Jon Ronson Quotes

Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.

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

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.

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

The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

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

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

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

I'm not what you'd call a fearless type of person.

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

You can say anything to David Icke and he will accept it and put it into his ideology.

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!

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

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

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.

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

We're living in post-nuance online times.

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.

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

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

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

The laughing way we make damaged people our playthings, it's so dehumanizing.

My paranoia never ends, but I haven't been paranoid about being spied on my shadowy forces for some time now.

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

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.

Capitalism, perhaps at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy.

I write funny nonfiction adventure books about crazy, serious worlds.

Most goat-related military activity is still highly classified.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy.

Success is always less funny than failure.

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.

I wondered what sort of woman loved a man like that.

(On the communist regime of Ceaușescu)"Romania, " said Eugene, "was twenty million people living inside the imagination of a madman.

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

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.

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.

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

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