Quotes from Jon Ronson

He said his worst days were when he allowed himself to hope for a second chance. The best were when he knew it was over forever and his destruction was necessary as a deterrent to others. I

Fiction seemed all about harnessing infinity. In fiction, when you walk into a restaurant and you sit down, there's nobody there and the restaurant doesn't exist. The restaurant is a horrific, never-ending nothingness. So you make scattershot decisions about what the restaurant might look like and the person you might be sitting with.

we're raised to believe that deep down everyone has a conscience." At

His idea was that humans totally lose control of their behavior in a crowd.

The Antisocial Personality [This type of personality] cannot feel any sense of remorse or shame. They approve only of destructive actions. They appear quite rational. They can be very convincing. —L.

the American physician Samuel Cartwright identifying in 1851 a mental disorder, drapetomania, evident only in slaves. The sole symptom was "the desire to run away from slavery" and the cure was to "whip the devil out of them

But at the core of psychopathy is a lack of moral restraint.

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

which is why she tried to join the RAF, so she could obtain a socially respectable opportunity to gratify her homicidal urges." "So

I understood why parents would want to do that, but it wasn't the message I was going for. If anyone should change their behaviour, I thought, it ought to be those doing the shaming. Justine's crime had been a badly worded joke mocking privilege. To see the catastrophe as her fault felt to me a little like 'Don't wear short skirts'. It felt like victim-blaming.

She summarized: "So. Don't get shitfaced, don't fist her ass, enjoy.

complicated human behavior was increasingly getting labeled a mental disorder.

As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don't act like Blofeld--monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about boring, impenetrable people. ...If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

The NSA is looking for terrorists. They're not getting psychosexual pleasure out of their schadenfreude about you."—

Facebook is where you lie to your friends, Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers.

Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of normal," said Allen Frances.

I automatically started thinking about what I'd do if I had to prove I was sane. I'd like to think that just being my normal, essentially sane self would be enough, but I'd probably behave in such an overly polite and helpful and competent manner I'd come across like a mad butler with panic in his eyes.

Bryna is convinced her children are bipolar, and I wasn't going to swoop into a stranger's home for an afternoon and tell them all they were normal.

He blamed psychopaths for the brutal excesses of capitalism itself, that the system at its cruelest was a manifestation of a few people's anomalous amygdalae.

White supremacists were thrilled by Bannon's appointment. One of them declared on a radio show hosted by David Duke, the former KKK leader, "Something astonishing has happened. We appear to have taken over the Republican Party." How

It was a heartbreaking story. He closed his eyes tightly as he told it, so I took the opportunity to quickly check Twitter. I hate not knowing what's happening on Twitter.

There's an old Internet adage that as soon as you compare something to the Nazis you lose the argument.

the madness business is filled with people like Tony, reduced to their maddest edges.

On Twitter we make our own decisions about who deserves obliteration. We form our own consensus, and we aren't being influenced by the criminal justice system or by the media. This makes us formidable.