Quotes from Jon Ronson

all violence being a person's attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, he explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you'd expect of a psychopath.

He said that as it happened he was a gay porn star and if I wanted to know more about his work I should google him. I did and immediately saw many close-ups of his anus.

I love the way you talk. You just let it flow from you as if you own all the words in the world. They're your personal property and you make them dance for you.

the suspect, Colin Stagg, must be the person who introduces every single element. What you may then do is reflect that back. You must never introduce it first. If you do, you're fulfilling your hopes, you see?" I

At what point does querying diagnostic criteria tip over into mocking the unusual symptoms of people in very real distress?

Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse.

frightening person pretending to be normal. Things

Once labeled schizophrenic the pseudopatient was stuck with that label. —DAVID ROSENHAN

he's a grey area, in a world that doesn't like grey areas, but the grey areas are where you find the complexity, it's where you find the humanity, and it's where you find the truth.

I should be campaigning for his release in print in a way that appeared crusading but actually wasn't quite effective enough to work. Like planting barely noticeable seeds of doubt into the prose. Subtle. I

When you say Jonah seems broken, what do you mean? Justine said. I think he's broken and that people mistake it for shamelessness, I said. People really were very keen to imagine Jonah as shameless, as lacking in that quality, like he was something not quite human that had adopted human form. I suppose it's no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt—before, during, or after the hurting occurs.

name. It was truly a revolution in psychiatry, and a gold rush for drug companies, who suddenly had hundreds of new disorders they could invent medications for, millions of new patients they could treat. "The

The people we were destroying were no longer just people like Jonah: public figures who had committed actual transgressions. They were private individuals who really hadn't done anything much wrong. Ordinary humans were being forced to learn damage control, like corporations that had committed PR disasters. It was very stressful.

with social media we've created a stage for constant artificial high dramas. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain.

brilliant and audacious as ever — a beat poet of paranoia. He

this was a man palpably simulating crying, which made the moment at once awkward, surreal, and quite disturbing.     Our

And a surfeit of checklists, coupled with unscrupulous drug reps, is, Gary said, a dreadful combination.     There

Guy fell silent again. And then he said—and his voice sounded sorrowful and distressed—"Last week I killed my hamster." "Just by staring at it?" I asked. "Yes," confirmed Guy.

Many kids who would have been called eccentric, different, were suddenly labeled autistic." I

The consensus from the beginning was that only 1 percent of humans had it, but the chaos they caused was so far-reaching it could actually remold society, remold it all wrong

The way the diagnosis is being made in America was not something we intended," he said. "Kids with extreme irritability and moodiness and temper tantrums are being called bipolar.

Terrible things had been done in Haiti in his name. He had profoundly altered Haitian society for three years, set it spiraling frantically in the wrong direction, destroying the lives of thousands, tainting hundreds of thousands more.

A wronged person is still a wronged person even if they're an unfashionable wronged person.