Quotes from Johann Hari

I'm so patriotic, I think every British kid should have a chance to grow up to be our head of state.

All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do.

I respect you as a person too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs.

Loneliness isn't the physical absence of other people, he said—it's the sense that you're not sharing anything that matters with anyone else. If you have lots of people around you—perhaps even a husband or wife, or a family, or a busy workplace—but you don't share anything that matters with them, then you'll still be lonely.

It isn't the drug that causes the harmful behavior—it's the environment. An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life almost never will, no matter how many drugs you make available to him. As Bruce put it: he was realizing that addiction isn't a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It's not you—it's the cage you live in.

What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?

You aren't a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met.

Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti,26 who explained: "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

punishment—shaming a person, caging them, making them unemployable—traps them in addiction. Taking that money and spending it instead on helping them to get jobs and homes and decent lives makes it possible for many of them to stop.

Despair often happens, he had learned, when there is a "lack of balance between efforts and rewards.

Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them.

It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear. It is a logic that keeps recurring throughout human history, from the Crusades to the witch hunts to the present day.

The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people's emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn't just a sign that you were better educated—because reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy.

You don't get what you don't fight for.

The more you think life is about having stuff and superiority and showing it off, the more unhappy, and the more depressed and anxious, you will be.

To end loneliness, you need other people—plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you. You have to be in it together—and "it" can be anything that you both think has meaning and value.

Your working assumption, when you meet a homophobe, should be that they are gay.

When they talk among themselves, advertising people have been admitting since the 1920s that their job is to make people feel inadequate—and then offer their product as the solution to the sense of inadequacy they have created.

the core of addiction doesn't lie in what you swallow or inject—it's in the pain you feel in your head. Yet we have built a system that thinks we will stop addicts by increasing their pain. "If I had to design a system that was intended to keep people addicted, I'd design exactly the system that we have right now,

The difference between being online and being physically among people, I saw in that moment, is a bit like the difference between pornography and sex: it addresses a basic itch, but it's never satisfying.

We grieve because we have loved. We grieve because the person we have lost mattered to us. To say that grief should disappear on a neat timetable is an insult to the love we felt.

I got my dad a great father's Day present. He called to say: 'Ach. Zis present is so good I now think it vas almost vorth having children.

How do we start to rebuild a society where we don't feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption?

for each traumatic event that happened to a child, they were two to four times more likely to grow up to be an addicted adult.