Quotes by Jon Ronson

“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 f...”

“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.”

“Psychopaths [make] the world go around...society [is] an expression of that particular sort of madness...I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? Wha...”

“The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99...There are currently 374 mental disorders. I bought the book...and leafed through it...I c...”

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

“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...”

“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...”

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

“I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening...”

“Even sleep offered no respite from my mental disorders. There was Nightmare Disorder, which is diagnosed when the sufferer dreams of being "pursued or declared a failure." All my nightmares involve...”

“The days that followed passed slowly. I lay in my hotel room and watched the kind of strange European TV that would probably make perfect sense if I understood the language, but because I didnt, th...”

“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”

“The word forever had been coming up a lot during my two years among the publicly shamed. Jonah and Justine and people like them were being told, 'No. There is no door. There is no way back in. We d...”

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

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

“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.”

“It's not a remarkable note except for one thing. The typeface Tony used to print it is the exact typeface Kubrick used for the posters and title sequences of 'Eyes Wide Shut' and '2001'.'It's Futur...”

“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.”

“The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.”

“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 ...”