Quotes from Jon Ronson

The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people.

In the early days of Twitter, it was like a place of radical de-shaming. People would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, 'Oh my God, I'm exactly the same.' Voiceless people realized that they had a voice, and it was powerful and eloquent.

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.

I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I, personally, no longer take part in the ecstatic public condemnation of people unless they've committed a transgression that has an actual victim, and even then not as much as I probably should. I miss the fun a little. But it feels like when I became a vegetarian. I missed the steak, although not as much as I'd anticipated, but I could no longer ignore the slaughterhouse.

A strange thing happens when you interview a robot. You feel an urge to be profound: to ask profound questions. I suppose it's an inter-species thing. Although if it is I wonder why I never try and be profound around my dog. 'What does electricity taste like?' I ask. 'Like a planet around a star,' Bina48 replies. Which is either extraordinary or meaningless - I'm not sure which

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.

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

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

Practically every prime-time program is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear we're becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren't as anxious as they are. We might be paranoid but we aren't as paranoid as they are. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we're not as mad as they are.

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.

I closed the manual. "I wonder if I've got any of the 374 mental disorders," I thought. I opened the manual again. And I instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.

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

It is slightly chilling to realize there are rational, functional people up there employed to spot, nurture, and exploit those down here among us who are irrational and can barely cope. If you want to know how stupid you're perceived to be by the people up there, count the unsolicited junk mail you receive. If you get a lot, you're perceived to be alluringly stupid.

We were much more frightening than Judge Ted Poe. The powerful, crazy, cruel people I usually write about tend to be in far-off places. The powerful, crazy, cruel people were now us. It felt like we were soldiers making war on other people's flaws, and there had suddenly been an escalation in hostilities.

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

I couldn't see where the collection of Burger King figurines fit in, but I supposed there was no reason why psychopaths shouldn't have unrelated hobbies.