Jon Ronson Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

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

‎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.

Success is always less funny than failure.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Somebody told me, “Twitter hates tabloids, but Twitter is constantly acting like a tabloid, repeating the mistakes of the things we’re hoping to better.” Twitter wanted to become a more egalitarian justice system, but instead it became a draconian one.

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

We're living in post-nuance online times.

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.

At the end of our conversation she (Martha Stout) turned to address you, the reader. She said if you're beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you're feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.

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

On social media there's this thing where on many occasions, there's a single proscribed way of acting. Like if somebody dies, everyone has to say "R.I.P.! R.I.P.!" Basically they're saying, "Don't hurt me, I'm a good person."