Quotes About Paranoia

Never trust a duck.

Can you imagine there being so many people that you could just murder one and nobody would know who did it right away?

am an unreliable narrator, hypervigilant to the point of being paranoid, imposing all my own insecurities onto him. I can't even recall if I actually felt that pain or imagined it, since I have rewritten this memory so many times I have mauled it down to nothing, erasing him down until he was a smudge of resentment while I was a smudge of entitlement until we both smudged into me.

you believe you are always being watched and judged, you are not really a free individual.

Since such assumptions are limited only by one's imagination and are encouraged daily by revelations of government and institutional invasion of privacy," they wrote, "the boundaries between paranoid delusions and justified cautions indeed become tenuous.

Perhaps the only thing worse than having a mole is the fear of having a mole.

Living with an addict is a 24/7 business. It's a bit like having a baby. You're joined at the hip, and every five minutes you're hit with that paranoia: where is he? What's he doing? What's he up to? If he was going somewhere, we made him call us as soon as he arrived; if a journey was supposed to take ten minutes, and he took twenty, we'd be going: why are you late?

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

Oh, God, if I'm anything by a clinical name, I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

RIM's chief saw the semiconductor giant as a dangerous, tricky heavyweight whose every employee lived by former CEO Andy Grove's mantra, "Only the paranoid survive.

I did not know, however, that ancient glories imply, at least in the middle of the present century, present fatigue and, quite probably, paranoia; that there is a limit to the role of intelligence in human affairs; and that no people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

This lack of what may roughly be called social paranoia causes the American writer in Europe to feel—almost certainly for the first time in his life—that he can reach out to everyone, that he is accessible to everyone and open to everything. This is an extraordinary feeling. He feels, so to speak, his own weight, his own value.

And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.

It's hard to see the difference between greatness and mediocrity in good times, when almost everyone is thriving. But when the turbulent times come, the difference becomes stark; the companies that exercised productive paranoia far in advance will pull ahead of the weak mediocrities. And even if the ill-prepared survive the disruptive shock, they will likely never close the gap. The strong and well prepared before the storm continue to pull ahead, never to look back.

I was afraid of all girls, most boys and selected male and female adults. My fear derived from my apocalyptic fantasy apparatus. I knew that all things went chaotically bad. My empirical training in chaos was unassailably valid.

Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.

I feel that Julian Assange came to be both paranoid and self-regarding in ways that ultimately undermined his own mission. And so, the transparency radical became a secret-keeper instead of a secret-leaker. And that, I think, is a big problem.

I'm constantly paranoid that I'll be unemployed for the rest of my life... and have to go back folding shirts at the Gap, which you know... you gotta do what you gotta do.

When I was a teenager, if anyone recognized me for anything I did, it would ruin my day. I couldn't handle it. It was some sort of neurotic phobia. I guess I was paranoid that people would treat me differently, or in an unfair way, because of my job.

When he is late for dinner and I know he must be either having an affair or lying dead in the street, I always hope he's dead.

I can't even go on a spontaneous walk or to a restaurant without armored cars and police, but there is no alternative.

I was scared someone would ask me something I didn't know and I'd be on the spot. It's the paranoia of a very shy person. I've gotten over those feelings about interviews for the most part.

Today's difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.

For a long time, I had this constant feeling that I just wanted to look behind me. The hairs on my neck were standing up all the time, I didn't know where was safe.