Jon Ronson Quotes

#1. In fact, ever since I first learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing it everywhere.

Jon Ronson

#2. The NSA is looking for terrorists. They're not getting psychosexual pleasure out of their schadenfreude about you. -

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#3. They assumed the endeavor was brilliant and rational because they were brilliant and rational, and we tend to automatically assume that everybody else is basically just like us.

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#4. maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder. I

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#5. Sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.

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#6. Shameworthiness lies in the space between who we are and how we present ourselves to the world

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#7. There's an old Internet adage that as soon as you compare something to the Nazis you lose the argument.

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#8. brilliant and audacious as ever - a beat poet of paranoia. He

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#9. Can't you see? It's incredibly interesting. Aren't you struck by how much action occurred simply because something went wrong with one man's brain? It's as if the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter's brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere." The

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#10. In our line of work the more humiliated a person is, the more viral the story tends to go. Shame can factor large in the life of a journalist - the personal avoidance of it and the professional bestowing of it onto others.

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#11. In the midst of a burning-hot shaming, calling for patience and context and understanding and empathy can really land you in trouble.

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#12. There are obviously a lot of very ill people out there. But there are also people in the middle, getting overlabeled, becoming nothing more than a big splurge of madness in the minds of the people who benefit from it.

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

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#14. Twitter wanted to become a more egalitarian justice system, but instead it became a draconian one.

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#15. Bryna is convinced her children are bipolar, and I wasn't going to swoop into a stranger's home for an afternoon and tell them all they were normal.

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

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#17. Aplomb. I had managed to portray myself as a good Jew and,

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#18. Twitter hates tabloids, but Twitter is constantly acting like a tabloid, repeating the mistakes of the things we're hoping to better.

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#19. He said ... Everyone's attention span is so short. They'll be mad about something new today.

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#20. The justice system in the West has a lot of problems," Poe said, "but at least there are rules. You have basic rights as the accused. You have your day in court. You don't have any rights when you're accused on the Internet. And the consequences are worse. It's worldwide forever.

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#21. There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.

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#22. Of course there are people who would like to eat breakfast without the screams of toddlers all around them, but those people should get over themselves and stop being stuck up and idiotic.

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#23. Scattered throughout the week were a surprising number of speeches about how we may be killed by undocumented immigrants driving drunk. I

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#24. if you get between the lawyer and his goal, you're going to get hurt.

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#25. At what point does querying diagnostic criteria tip over into mocking the unusual symptoms of people in very real distress?

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#26. The Americans have always been better than the Iraqis at the leaflets. Early on in the first Gulf War, Iraqi PsyOps dropped a batch of their own leaflets on US troops, designed to be psychologically devastating. They read, 'Your wives are back at home having sex with Bart Simpson and Burt Reynolds.

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#27. That's what I Am a Strange Loop is about," said Deborah. "It's about how we spend our lives self-referencing, over and over, in a kind of strange loop.

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#28. Most goat-related military activity is still highly classified.

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#29. I hadn't realized what a collage of mental disorders my whole life has been,

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#30. I told a journalist that Dave seemed quite psychopathic (I didn't know a thing about psychopaths but I assumed that that was the sort of thing they might do).

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#31. Others took exception to being forced to wear little-girl-type dresses (a psychopath-devised punishment for noncooperation in the program).

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#32. 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.

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#33. Bad liars always think they're good at it. (quoting Michael Moynihan)

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#34. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things. He

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#35. 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.

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#36. Is Obama satanic?" he asked me. I was grateful for the conversation starter - I consider anything that staves off social awkwardness to be a blessing - but I couldn't lie.

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#37. We have to think about what level of mercilessness we feel comfortable with.

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

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#39. My ideal world was the early days of Twitter, where everyone was curious about each other and everyone saw it as kind of a window into people's lives where we could be compassionate and curious and empathetic and we could tell each other secrets.

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#40. No, people back home don't realize why there is this kind of need for heroes in America at the moment. People in Britain don't really understand what's going on here. They don't understand why Camp X-ray exists.

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#41. I saw at least one analysis of the experiment where the author seemed to find it perfectly plausible that if a person was overcome by a violent madness he'd involuntarily start to sound like someone from Louisiana.

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#42. He blamed psychopaths for the brutal excesses of capitalism itself, that the system at its cruelest was a manifestation of a few people's anomalous amygdalae.

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#43. 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.

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#44. Shame internalized can lead to agony.

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

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#46. I have thought sometimes that the sanest people, the people who are just very balanced, very happy, are probably lower achieving than other people. My kind of irrationality happens to be fear or anxiety.

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#47. After the interview ended, Stone and I were ushered out. Alex had an interview with Ted Nugent to conduct. In the elevator, Stone scrutinized me. "When we try to assess threats," he said, "the kooks are almost always wearing snowsuits in 90-degree weather.

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

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#49. Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere.

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#50. I wasn't in any way a kind of soothsayer or not surprised when Sept. 11 happened. I was absolutely shocked.

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#51. But on the extremist side I didn't get any rejections at all. Everyone agreed to talk to me.

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

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#53. So, yeah, the psychopath might cry when his dog dies and you think that's misplaced because he doesn't cry when his daughter dies." I

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#54. I love the way you talk. You just let it flow from you as if you own all the words in the world. They're your personal property and you make them dance for you.

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#55. the Bush family's proclivity for mock human sacrifice. What

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#56. Sometimes labeling is only useful, like with OCD. Once you're labeled you can be treated. On other occasions labeling leads to tyranny, like with childhood bipolar disorder in the U.S.

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#57. The quest for seizing that amygdala moment, those crushing seconds of unbearable, incapacitating shock, seizing these moments and not letting them go, dragging them out for as long as is operationally necessary, that, said Sid, is the aim of the Bucha effect.

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#58. after his lawyer argued that given the passage of time, he wouldn't have a fair hearing. He became a pariah in the offender-profiling world. Now,

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#59. The way I portrayed the people is accurate. Because they're human beings and we have a kind of wonderful capacity to be absurd and ridiculous.

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

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#61. I learned, the field of interest was a man from Wales who could recognize all his sheep as individuals but couldn't recognize human faces, not even his wife, not even himself in the mirror.

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#62. which is why she tried to join the RAF, so she could obtain a socially respectable opportunity to gratify her homicidal urges." "So

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#63. We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we'd never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.

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#64. [ ... ] we will turn this place around, and a new civilization can be born that does not know boundary lines but knows better how to live in the garden and knows that we are one thought away from paradise.

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

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#66. I just want you to know that it makes me feel like shit to do this." "And Jonah paused," Michael told me. "And then he said to me, no joke, he said, 'You know, I really don't care how you feel.'" Michael shook his head. "It was icy.

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#67. I heard a story about her once,' said James. 'She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn't know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.

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#68. 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.

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#69. this was a man palpably simulating crying, which made the moment at once awkward, surreal, and quite disturbing. Our

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#70. 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?

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#71. I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read DSM-IV when you're not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.

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#72. I thought about my own over-anxious brain, my own sort of madness. Was it a more powerful engine in my life than my rationality?

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#73. A lot of people move around in life chronically ashamed of how they look, or how they feel, or what they said, or what they did. It's like a permanent adolescent concern. Adolescence is when you're permanently concerned about what other people think of you.

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#74. complicated human behavior was increasingly getting labeled a mental disorder.

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#75. what's the point in threatening them with imprisonment if they break the terms of their parole? The threat has no meaning for them." He

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

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#77. I didn't realize he was a drunk driver,' I said. 'The other superheroes inferred it was just a regular, random guy you were trying to force a taco onto. But still' - I indicate the nearby crack dealers - 'the Taco Incident surely demonstrates how things can inadvertently spiral.

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#78. Tony faked mental illness. That's when you have hallucinations and delusions. Mental illness comes and goes. It can get better with medication. Tony is a psychopath. That doesn't come and go. It is how the person is." Faking

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#79. This place is packed with beautiful hipsters. While the Coney Island bombast radiated sincerity, everything here seems more ironic. When someone in the crowd ironically chants, 'USA!' someone else ironically chants back, 'Mother Russia.

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#80. Well, I had nightmares when I was doing the Klan story all the time. I had a recurring nightmare of basically being exposed as a Jew inside the Klan compound.

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#81. We want to see ourselves as curious and open-minded and smart and understanding things in terms of context and nuance, but when someone tries to do that in the midst of a shaming they're turned on.

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#82. 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.

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#83. We don't want obvious exploitation. We want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.

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#84. This was everyday life on social media, each side lurching toward mockery and attack - fanning the flames of the divisive chaos from which Trump, the Twitter candidate, had risen.

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#85. Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that.

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#86. His name was Roger Stone. And he was the man who first introduced Alex Jones to his close friend Donald Trump. *

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#87. I consider it somewhat psychopathic to label someone from afar as a psychopath. We love nothing more than to declare other people insane, especially people we don't like.

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#88. You remain with the person you've just been yelling at until the resentments fizzle. That's how wounds heal.

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#89. Serial killers ruin families,' shrugged Bob. 'Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.

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#90. I should be campaigning for his release in print in a way that appeared crusading but actually wasn't quite effective enough to work. Like planting barely noticeable seeds of doubt into the prose. Subtle. I

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#91. I vaguely remembered hearing psychologists say there was a preponderance of psychopaths at the top - in the corporate and political worlds - a clinical absence of empathy being a benefit in those environments.

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#92. But when I was doing the KKK I had constant nightmares of being exposed as a Jew and lynched by the Klan.

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#93. Given all of this, you'd think LeBon's work might have at some point stopped being influential. But it never did. I suppose one reason for his enduring success is that we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane.

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

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#95. Success is always less funny than failure.

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#96. Trump might have appointed a less-eerie chief to replace Manafort. But instead he doubled-down, choosing the even eerier Stephen Bannon. Bannon

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#97. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

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

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#99. 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.

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

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