Jon Ronson Quotes

#1. Jon Ronson makes me laugh. I've read all of his books.

Bill Hader

#2. I was sad Jon Ronson, who wrote in the Guardian and has made a TV show for Channel 4, took against me.

Jonathan King

#3. I'd been beguiled by the new technology - a toddler crawling toward a gun.

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

#5. Once labeled schizophrenic the pseudopatient was stuck with that label. - DAVID ROSENHAN,

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

#8. 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.

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

#10. 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.

Jon Ronson

#11. 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.

Jon Ronson

#12. Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?

Jon Ronson

#13. He fulfilled the bipolar checklist. See? And so they gave him some pretty heavy-duty medication. It slowed him way down, to a drooling fat kid. And they declared the meds a success." It

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

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

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

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#17. 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

Jon Ronson

#18. 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.

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

#20. 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.

Jon Ronson

#21. I would also say you can never reduce any person to a diagnostic label.

Jon Ronson

#22. The more he told me about himself, the more leverage I had for manipulation," he told Bob's researcher. "I just kept fueling the fire; the more fuel I added to the fire, the bigger payoff for me. I was the puppet master pulling the strings." Eventually

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

Jon Ronson

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

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#26. I am the neurological opposite of a psychopath, in that I feel anxious almost all the time. It must be great to not constantly feel like you've got someone living inside your face, shooting you with a mini Taser.

Jon Ronson

#27. frightening person pretending to be normal. Things

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#28. In regular circumstances, 60 percent of criminal psychopaths released into the outside world go on to re-offend. What percentage of their psychopaths had? As it turned out: 80 percent. The Capsule had made the psychopaths worse.

Jon Ronson

#29. When I asked Robert Spitzer about the possibility that he'd inadvertently created a world in which ordinary behaviours were being labelled mental disorders, he fell silent. I waited for him to answer. But the silence lasted three minutes. Finally he said, 'I don't know.

Jon Ronson

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

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#31. deciding that instant judgment was a more heroic stance than curiosity. When

Jon Ronson

#32. 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.

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

#34. What happened, Bob explained to us now, although we didn't need telling, was that Jack Abbott was a psychopath. He couldn't bear being disrespected. His self-worth was too grandiose for that. He couldn't control his impulses. "When

Jon Ronson

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

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#36. Many kids who would have been called eccentric, different, were suddenly labeled autistic." I

Jon Ronson

#37. 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.

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

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#39. 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:

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

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#41. 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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#42. Please ejaculate", I silently urged the man, "so I can go to sleep". (In this way I imagine I was like millions of women before me

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

Jon Ronson

#44. I remembered those psychologists who said psychopaths made the world go around. They meant it: society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness.

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#45. Trying to solve the mystery is what I enjoy most about writing.

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#46. It's not a good idea to define the boundaries of normality by tearing apart people who are outside of it.

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#47. Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!

Jon Ronson

#48. They can't shit on us," said Alex. "That's really what I'm saying. You can't shit on us anymore." There was a silence. "I just want them to stop shitting on us," said Alex. "OK," I said. "Sorry.

Jon Ronson

#49. 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.

Jon Ronson

#50. name. It was truly a revolution in psychiatry, and a gold rush for drug companies, who suddenly had hundreds of new disorders they could invent medications for, millions of new patients they could treat. "The

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

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

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

Jon Ronson

#57. 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.

Jon Ronson

#58. 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.

Jon Ronson

#59. Be patient and curious instead of instantly judgemental.

Jon Ronson

#60. Google has the informal corporate motto of "don't be evil", but they make money when anything happens online, even the bad stuff.' In

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

Jon Ronson

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

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#63. 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).

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

#66. 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.

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

#68. 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

Jon Ronson

#69. 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.

Jon Ronson

#70. 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.

Jon Ronson

#71. 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.

Jon Ronson

#72. The self-esteem of psychiatry got very low as a result of it. It had never really been accepted as part of medicine because the diagnoses were so unreliable, and the Rosenhan experiment confirmed it." Spitzer's

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

#74. The biggest lie," he said, "is, The Internet is about you." We like to think of ourselves as people who have choice and taste and personalized content. But the Internet isn't about us. It's about the companies that dominate the data flows of the Internet." Now

Jon Ronson

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

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

Jon Ronson

#77. The UFO community?" I said. "Why would government spies want to infiltrate that?" "Oh, Jon," said Steven. "Don't be naive.

Jon Ronson

#78. At first, I did stories on people who were maybe just eccentric. Omar was a natural progression from that.

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

#80. 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.

Jon Ronson

#81. Discover the time of day when you write best, and write then. For me it's about 7 am to noon. For other people it's overnight. Try not to do anything other than write between those times.

Jon Ronson

#82. 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.

Jon Ronson

#83. Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.

Jon Ronson

#84. The judge took one look at it and threw it out. He said the honey trap was "deceptive conduct of the grossest kind"; the idea of "a psychological profile being admissible as proof of identity in any circumstances [was] redolent with considerable danger." And

Jon Ronson

#85. She summarized: "So. Don't get shitfaced, don't fist her ass, enjoy.

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#86. 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.

Jon Ronson

#87. 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.

Jon Ronson

#88. 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.

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

#90. A terrified-looking bystander, a nerdy man in a sweater, calls the police and stammers into the phone: 'A huge group of people are fighting and there's pepper spray and superheroes and I don't know.

Jon Ronson

#91. There's definitely evidence that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior. When you look at the worst corners of the American health insurance industry or the sub-prime banking market, it really feels like the more psychopathically someone behaves, the more it's rewarded.

Jon Ronson

#92. Whereas shame let out can lead to freedom, or at least to a funny story, which is a sort of freedom too.

Jon Ronson

#93. Shame internalized can lead to agony.

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#94. We're living in post-nuance online times.

Jon Ronson

#95. White supremacists were thrilled by Bannon's appointment. One of them declared on a radio show hosted by David Duke, the former KKK leader, "Something astonishing has happened. We appear to have taken over the Republican Party." How

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#96. It wasn't easy to learn about Gustave LeBon. For being the father of such an enduring theory, almost nothing has been written about him. Only one man has ever tried to piece his life story together - Bob Nye, a professor of European intellectual history at Oregon State University.

Jon Ronson

#97. Stone announced in early April that if delegates at the Republican National Convention had the nerve to switch from Trump to another candidate, "we will disclose [their] hotels and room numbers." Anderson

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

#99. My worryingly paradoxical thought process could be summarized thus: Thank God I don't believe in the secret rulers of the world. Imagine what the secret rulers of the world might do to me if I did!

Jon Ronson

#100. 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.

Jon Ronson