Quotes from Jon Ronson

Serial killers ruin families." Bob shrugged. "Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.

we will turn this place around, and a new civilization can be born that does not know boundary lines but knows better how to live in the garden and knows that we are one thought away from paradise.

This—Bob was saying—was the straightforward solution to the greatest mystery of all: Why is the world so unfair? Why all that savage economic injustice, those brutal wars, the everyday corporate cruelty? The answer: psychopaths.

And then there were terrible things, like Alex's assertion that the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 children was "completely fake … they clearly used actors." Inspired by claims like this, Sandy Hook "truthers" had begun bombarding the parents of the murdered children with messages like: "You're a fraud and an asshole. Rot in hell you fucking prick." (That one had been sent to Lenny Pozner, whose 6-year-old son, Noah, died in the shooting.)

Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there's not much left except the will to win.

For men who have lived for a lifetime on a diet of contempt and disdain, the temptation to gain instant respect in this way can be worth far more than the cost of going to prison or even of dying.' And after

Alex is basically the most irresponsible man I have ever met. He uses his powers to inflame paranoia. He boldly makes stuff up to suit his weird agenda. Alex eschews facts and reason and he definitely should not have political sway.

They seemed perfectly ordinary. This, Elliott deduced, was because they were burying their insanity deep beneath a façade of normality.

The way we construct consciousness is to tell the story of ourselves to ourselves, the story of who we believe we are. I feel that a really public shaming or humiliation is a conflict between the person trying to write his own narrative and society trying to write a different narrative for the person. One story tries to overwrite the other. And so to survive you have to own your story.

We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it.

if you get between the lawyer and his goal, you're going to get hurt.

As the law stands in the UK, you cannot indefinitely detain an 'untreatable' patient if their crime was a relatively minor one like GBH.)

He said hurting people was better than sex.

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

Petter and I were probably peas in a pod.

we tend to automatically assume that everybody else is basically just like us.

I remember that Karl Marx line about religion being the opium of the people—his idea that the elites keep the masses subdued with illusory happiness.

the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter's brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere.

On the communist regime of Ceau?escu) Romania, said Eugene, was twenty million people living inside the imagination of a madman.

The flaws of some people lead to horrors inflicted on to others. And then there are the more human flaws that, when you shine a light on to them, de-demonise people that might otherwise be seen as ogres.

a major named Ed Dames, had taken to psychic spying on the Loch Ness monster during the fallow months, when there wasn't much official military psychic work. He determined that it was a dinosaur's ghost. This finding irritated some of the others, who considered it unscientific and frankly implausible.

Al was referring to the time during the Cuban missile crisis that he left his five-months-pregnant wife home alone with no food or access to money and in desperation she had to call her mother and sister for help. "Oh!

I had to remind myself that it's good for journalists to feel demeaned. It means we're onto a story.

We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age. "Look!" we're saying. "WE'RE normal! THIS is the average!" We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it.