Quotes from Jon Ronson

the Bush family's proclivity for mock human sacrifice. What

Trump might have appointed a less-eerie chief to replace Manafort. But instead he doubled-down, choosing the even eerier Stephen Bannon. Bannon

The idea of Donald Trump and Alex Jones and Roger Stone and Stephen Bannon having power over us — that is terrifying. THE END

psychopaths made the world go around.

society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness.

society to be a fundamentally rational thing

This was everyday life on social media, each side lurching toward mockery and attack — fanning the flames of the divisive chaos from which Trump, the Twitter candidate, had risen.

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.

I phoned home but my wife didn't answer. It crossed my mind that she might be dead. I panicked. Then it turned out that she wasn't dead. She had just been at the shops.

we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane.

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 don't offer any forgiveness.' But we know that people are complicated and have a mixture of flaws and talents and sins. So why do we pretend that we don't?

if you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there's not much left except the will to win

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

You remain with the person you've just been yelling at until the resentments fizzle. That's how wounds heal.

Feedback is an engineering principle, Adam's email to me ended. 'And all engineering is devoted to trying to keep the thing you are building stable.

It felt like a vast left-wing conspiracy to pretend to have found Eric André's performance funny. This was everyday life on social media, each side lurching toward mockery and attack — fanning the flames of the divisive chaos from which Trump, the Twitter candidate, had risen. But

American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.

It was, she said, the way the book had revealed an inherent narcissism in its recipients.

the world that psychiatrists are wicked and must be stopped.

It turns out that the concept of group madness was the creation of a nineteenth-century French doctor called Gustave Le Bon. His idea was that humans totally lose control of their behaviour in a crowd. Our free will evaporates. A contagious madness takes over, a complete lack of restraint. We can't stop ourselves.

psychopaths as "predators who use charm, manipulation, intimidation, sex and violence to control others and to satisfy their own selfish needs. Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse. What is missing, in other words, are the very qualities that allow a human being to live in social harmony.

We should be like dogs.

The quest for seizing that amygdala moment, those crushing seconds of unbearable, incapacitating shock, seizing these moments and not letting them go, dragging them out for as long as is operationally necessary, that, said Sid, is the aim of the Bucha effect.

what's the point in threatening them with imprisonment if they break the terms of their parole? The threat has no meaning for them." He