58 Mind-Blowing Quotes By Jon Ronson That Will Keep You Clear-Headed

‎I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe.

  

I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.

Family

  

Friends are the fruitcake of life - some nutty, some soaked in alcohol, some sweet.

Life

  

But we know that people are complicated and have a mixture of flaws and talents and sins. So why do we pretend that we don’t?

  

Most goat-related military activity is still highly classified.

  

Oh, you know what bloggers are like, they write and write and write. I don't know why, because they're not being paid.

Like

  

We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it.

  

We aren't all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths. And psychopaths are to blame for this brutal, mis-shapen society.

Trying

  

The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

Never

  

That's an incredibly depressing thought," I said "that if you're in a room and at one end lies madness and at the other end lies sanity it is human nature to veer towards the madness end.

  

Feeling no remorse must be a blessing when all you have are your memories

  

We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age.

Think

  

There is nothing I dislike more in the world than people who care more about ideology than they do about people.

  

We were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland.

  

We’re creating a culture where people feel constantly surveilled, where people are afraid to be themselves.

Culture

  

I couldn't see where the collection of Burger King figurines fit in, but I supposed there was no reason why psychopaths shouldn't have unrelated hobbies.

  

Trying to prove you’re not a psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you’re not mentally ill,’ said Tony.

Trying

  

I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be.

Like , Think

  

If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

  

People who are normal (i.e., sane, sensible) don’t try to open lines of communication with total strangers by writing them a series of disjointed, weird, cryptic messages.

  

I’ve always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn’t? What if it is built on insanity?

  

Ask a victim to look at the positive things and she’ll say, ‘I can’t. My eyes are swollen,

  

Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.

  

Serial killers ruin families,’ shrugged Bob. ‘Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.

  

As soon as the victim steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed,” he said, “the whole thing crumbles.

  

Shall we go?' he murmured, perhaps regretting his decision to show me his army of plastic cartoon figurines.

Me

  

Wow," I say, politely, but I don't feel it. I'm like a sociopath when it comes to expensive cars. I feel no emotion.

Like

  

[W]e need to think twice about raining down vengeance and anger as our default position.

Think

  

What a brilliant cover story. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what's the best rock to hide something under? It's the rock called failure.

Like

  

I closed the manual. “I wonder if I’ve got any of the 374 mental disorders,” I thought. I opened the manual again. And I instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.

  

I suspect it was probably unusual to suffer from both Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Malingering, unproductiveness tending to make me feel anxious, but there it was. I had both.

Me

  

But with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain.

  

It may very well be that the frotteurist is a helpless victim in the clutches of his obsession, but it’s equally possible that he’s simply a bored creep looking for a cheap thrill.

  

If anyone should change their behaviour, I thought, it ought to be those doing the shaming.

  

TV is just troubled people being booed these days.

  

I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we've created a stage for constant artificial high drama.

Think

  

If you couldn't kill your adversaries, or keep them imprisoned for ever, there was surely only one option left in the Colonel Alexander canon: you change their minds.

  

You combine insecurity and ambition, and you get an inability to say no to things.

  

For all our mythologizing, the margins can be painful and some people are there because they have no choice.

  

As somebody back then wrote, “Facebook is where you lie to your friends, Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers.

  

For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers.

  

I’d been beguiled by the new technology—a toddler crawling toward a gun.

  

Shame internalized can lead to agony.

  

What we do, when we fuck up, we don’t lose our job. We lose our vocation.

  

We don’t want obvious exploitation. We want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.

  

One man was saying, ‘It cost me a new SUV for my wife,’” Andrew said. “Another said, ‘It cost me a cruise to the Bahamas and a new kitchen.’ Everyone was laughing.

Me

  

What we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing.

  

Their puffed-out cheeks are beetroot-red, making them resemble sweaty, meat-smeared squirrels.

  

Goebbels thinks that no one since the Frenchman LeBon has understood the mind of the masses as well as he,” wrote Goebbels’s aide Rudolf Semmler in his wartime diary.

  

He had twenty followers. Some were people I knew from real life, who were probably wondering why I’d suddenly become so passionate about fusion cooking and candid about dreaming about cock.

Life

  

When I was writing my biography of LeBon,” Bob Nye told me, “he seemed to me the biggest asshole in the whole of creation.

Me

  

If I had a spouse and two kids to support I certainly would not be telling ‘jokes’ like he was doing at a conference.

Like

  

When shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes, nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

Like , Never , Think

  

The powerful, crazy, cruel people were now us. It felt like we were soldiers making war on other people’s flaws, and there had suddenly been an escalation in hostilities.

Like

  

A crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. Exaggerate, affirm, resort to repetition, and never attempt to prove anything by reasoning.

Never

  

In the middle sat Brad Blanton. He was a large man. His shirt, open to his chest, was yellow-white, like his hair. With his sunburned face, he looked like a red ball abandoned in dirty snow.

Like

  

In a crowd we are “microbes” infecting everyone around us, a “grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.” We are impulsive, irritable, irrational:

  

Social scientists have written papers analyzing Eshelman’s every move in there, including the strange detail that the more brutally he behaved, the more American South his accent sounded.