Quotes from Jon Ronson

But surely stock-market psychopaths can't be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,' I said. 'Serial killers ruin families,' shrugged Bob. 'Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.

Wow, I say, politely, but I don't feel it. I'm like a sociopath when it comes to expensive cars. I feel no emotion.

For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers.

A crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. Exaggerate, affirm, resort to repetition, and never attempt to prove anything by reasoning.

An apology is supposed to be a communion—a coming together. For someone to make an apology, someone has to be listening. They listen and you speak and there's an exchange. That's why we have a thing about accepting apologies.

When shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes, nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

The Americans have always been better than the Iraqis at the leaflets. Early on in the first Gulf War, Iraqi PsyOps dropped a batch of their own leaflets on US troops, designed to be psychologically devastating. They read, 'Your wives are back at home having sex with Bart Simpson and Burt Reynolds.

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 more, defined by their maddest edges.

Shame internalized can lead to agony.

I'd been beguiled by the new technology—a toddler crawling toward a gun.

It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a 'feeling', for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness.

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. It's all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people.

Remember that the crazy people are not always to be found on the outside. Sometimes the crazy people are deeply embedded on the inside. Not even the most imaginative conspiracy theorist has ever thought to invent a scenario in which a crack team of Special Forces soldiers and major generals secretly try to walk through their walls and stare goats to death.

Maybe there are two types of people in the world: those who favour humans over ideology, and those who favour ideology over humans. 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 villain.

We don't want obvious exploitation. We want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.

I suspect it was probably unusual to suffer from both Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Malingering, unproductiveness tending to make me feel anxious, but there it was. I had both.

I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we've created a stage for constant artificial high drama.

The killer's name was Michael Stone and he was a known psychopath. He had previous convictions. But the law stated that only patients whose mental disorders were considered treatable could be detained beyond their prison sentences. Psychopaths were considered untreatable and so Michael Stone had to be free.

I just want you to know that it makes me feel like shit to do this." "And Jonah paused," Michael told me. "And then he said to me, no joke, he said, 'You know, I really don't care how you feel.'" Michael shook his head. "It was icy.

TV is just troubled people being booed these days.

It felt as if the people on Twitter had been invited to be characters in a courtroom drama, and had been allowed to choose their roles, and had all gone for the part of the hanging judge. Or it was even worse than that. They all had gone for the part of the people in the lithographs being ribald at whippings.

I kept remembering something Michael Fertik had said to me at the Village Pub in Woodside. '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.

in our line of work the more humiliated a person is, the more viral the story tends to go. Shame can factor large in the life of a journalist—the personal avoidance of it and the professional bestowing of it onto others.

Let's face it," my Deep Throat had said to me, "nobody rules the world anymore. The markets rule the world. Maybe that's why your conspiracy theorists make up all those crazy things. Because the truth is so much more frightening. Nobody rules the world. Nobody controls anything.