Quotes from Jon Ronson

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

They assumed the endeavor was brilliant and rational because they were brilliant and rational, and we tend to automatically assume that everybody else is basically just like us.

Can't you see? It's incredibly interesting. Aren't you struck by how much action occurred simply because something went wrong with one man's brain? It's as if the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter's brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere." The

The more he told me about himself, the more leverage I had for manipulation," he told Bob's researcher. "I just kept fueling the fire; the more fuel I added to the fire, the bigger payoff for me. I was the puppet master pulling the strings." Eventually

All violence {is} a person's attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

I remembered those psychologists who said psychopaths made the world go around. They meant it: society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness.

Look! We're saying. We're normal! This is the average! We're defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it.

I think he saw his checklist as something pure—innocent as only science can be—but the humans who administered it as masses of weird prejudices and crazy predispositions.     When

Fading photographs on the corridor walls from the 1960s and 1970s showed children strapped to frightening-looking machines, wires dangling from their heads. They smiled at the camera in uncomprehending excitement as if they were at the beach.

I hadn't realized what a collage of mental disorders my whole life has been

Psychopaths don't change, she [Essi Viding] said. They don't learn from punishment. The best you can hope for is that they'll eventually get too old and lazy to be bothered to offend. And they can seem impressive. Charismatic. People are dazzled. So, yeah, the real trouble starts when one makes it big in mainstream society.

There's a societal push for conformity in all ways. There's less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. (interview with Allen Frances)

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.

As a group they tend to be more charming than most people, she said. They have no warm emotions of their own but will study the rest of us. They're the boss or the coworker who likes to make other people jump just for the pleasure of seeing them jump. They're the spouse who marries to look socially normal but inside the marriage shows no love after the initial charm wears off.

What happened, Bob explained to us now, although we didn't need telling, was that Jack Abbott was a psychopath. He couldn't bear being disrespected. His self-worth was too grandiose for that. He couldn't control his impulses. "When

aplomb. I had managed to portray myself as a good Jew and

made them so terrifying, like a wholly malevolent space creature from a sci-fi movie.

Yes, observing is one of my biggest assets," he said, "I always observe.

a preponderance of psychopaths at the top, in the corporate and political worlds – a clinical absence of empathy being a benefit in those environments.

like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.

Of course, lots of people dehumanise others, find ways to irradiate empathy and remorse from their day jobs so they can preform their jobs better.

When you gaze into the eyes of another person you can only see as far as his closed door. So take it as an opportunity to knock on that door. If he doesn't want to open the door you bow to him and you say, That's fine. When you're ready.

The biggest lie," he said, "is, The Internet is about you." We like to think of ourselves as people who have choice and taste and personalized content. But the Internet isn't about us. It's about the companies that dominate the data flows of the Internet." Now

I asked Mercedes what sorts of people gathered on 4chan. A lot of them are bored, understimulated, overpersecuted, powerless kids, she replied. They know they can't be anything they want. So they went to the Internet. On the Internet we have power in situations where we would otherwise be powerless.