Quotes from Jon Ronson

A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone thought the yellow might calm them. But I couldn't see how. Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.

This is bizarre," Dan said. "I find it really strange—the way you're approaching this. You must be one of the very few people who have chosen to come on Twitter and use their own name as their Twitter name. Who does that? And that's why I'm a little suspicious of your motives, Jon. That's why I say I think you're using it as brand management.

The biggest lie," he said, "is, The Internet is about you.

The UFO community?" I said. "Why would government spies want to infiltrate that?" "Oh, Jon," said Steven. "Don't be naive.

the problem with Google is that it is forever evolving – adjusting its algorithm in ways it keeps secret.

But they're being labeled bipolar. That's an enormous label that's going to stay with you for the rest of your life.

That's the psychopath: somebody who doesn't understand what's going on emotionally, but understands that something important has happened." But

He fulfilled the bipolar checklist. See? And so they gave him some pretty heavy-duty medication. It slowed him way down, to a drooling fat kid. And they declared the meds a success." It

How you feed your family is not how we feed our family. For real. We're not out here just for the fun and just for the show-and-tell. This is real life." I am finding myself ostentatiously nodding at everything the crack dealers are saying, I suppose in the hope that if the shooting starts they'll remember my nods and make the effort to shoot around me.

You keep staying on our block we gonna have to show you what the burner do." "Thank you, it's great meeting you," says Phoenix. "What's a burner?" I whisper. "A gun," Phoenix whispers back. The man loops and rejoins the others. The streets are deserted. It's just the dealers and us. But then, miraculously, a taxi passes. I flag it. The superheroes all have bulletproof vests. I have nothing. I have a cardigan.

I would also say you can never reduce any person to a diagnostic label.

In fact, ever since I first learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing it everywhere.

There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal.

It's about the terror, isn't it? The terror of what? The terror of being found out.

He had experienced only kindness and forgiveness. Actually, it wasn't kindness and forgiveness. It was something much better than that. It was nothing. He experienced nothing.

He hosted a series of lunches – Les Dejeuners de Gustave Le Bon – for politicians and prominent society people. He'd sit at the head of the table with a bell by his side. If one of his guests said something he disagreed with he'd pick up the bell and ring it relentlessly until the person stopped talking.

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.

Well," he said, "the downside of having no barriers between doctors and patients was that everyone became a patient." There

All over the world, famous people began declaring themselves LeBon fans. Like Mussolini: "I have read all the work of Gustave LeBon and I don't know how many times I have reread The Crowd. It is a capital work to which, to this day, I frequently refer." And Goebbels: "Goebbels thinks that no one since the Frenchman LeBon has understood the mind of the masses as well as he," wrote Goebbels's aide Rudolf Semmler in his wartime diary.

I put a video out," Alex said, "a message to Trump. And then two days later he lays out the case. It's like sending up the Bat Signal." Was this true? It seemed unlikely, but when I got home I discovered that journalists had indeed spotted several occasions where Alex had said something on his show and Trump had said the same thing — right down to the peculiar phrasing — soon after.

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

He hosted a series of lunches—les déjeuners du mercredi—for politicians and prominent society people. He'd sit at the head of the table with a bell by his side. If one of his guests said something he disagreed with, he'd pick up the bell and ring it relentlessly until the person stopped talking. All over the world, famous people began declaring themselves LeBon fans.

And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things. He

In regular circumstances, 60 percent of criminal psychopaths released into the outside world go on to re-offend. What percentage of their psychopaths had? As it turned out: 80 percent. The Capsule had made the psychopaths worse.