Jon Ronson Quotes

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.

~ Jon Ronson

Shame internalized can lead to agony. Whereas shame let out can lead to freedom, or at least a funny story, which is a sort of freedom too.

~ Jon Ronson

The days that followed passed slowly. I lay in my hotel room and watched the kind of strange European TV that would probably make perfect sense if I understood the language, but because I didn’t, the programs just seemed dreamlike and baffling. In one studio show a group of Scandinavian academics watched as one of them poured liquid plastic into a bucket of cold water. It solidified, they pulled it out, handed it around the circle, and, as far as I could tell, intellectualized on its random misshapenness. I phoned home but my wife didn’t answer. It crossed my mind that she might be dead. I panicked. Then it turned out that she wasn’t dead. She had just been at the shops.

~ Jon Ronson

Psychopaths [make] the world go around...society [is] an expression of that particular sort of madness...I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?

~ Jon Ronson

Oh, you know what bloggers are like, they write and write and write. I don't know why, because they're not being paid.

~ Jon Ronson

At the end of our conversation she (Martha Stout) turned to address you, the reader. She said if you're beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you're feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.

~ Jon Ronson

Shall we go?' he murmured, perhaps regretting his decision to show me his army of plastic cartoon figurines.

~ Jon Ronson

I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. We can lead good, ethical lives, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all - even though we know that's not how we should define our fellow humans. What's true about our fellow humans is that we are clever and stupid. We are grey areas.And so ... when you see an unfair or an ambiguous shaming unfold, speak up on behalf of the shamed person. A babble of opposing voices - that's democracy.The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. Let's not turn it into a world where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.

~ Jon Ronson

Even sleep offered no respite from my mental disorders. There was Nightmare Disorder, which is diagnosed when the sufferer dreams of being pursued or declared a failure. All my nightmares involve someone chasing me down the street while yelling, You're a failure!

~ Jon Ronson

The word forever had been coming up a lot during my two years among the publicly shamed. Jonah and Justine and people like them were being told, 'No. There is no door. There is no way back in. We don't offer any forgiveness.' But we know that people are complicated and have a mixture of flaws and talents and sins. So why do we pretend that we don't?

~ Jon Ronson

‎I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe.

~ Jon Ronson

What a brilliant cover story. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what's the best rock to hide something under? It's the rock called failure.

~ Jon Ronson

It's not a remarkable note except for one thing. The typeface Tony used to print it is the exact typeface Kubrick used for the posters and title sequences of 'Eyes Wide Shut' and '2001'.'It's Futura Extra Bold,' explains Tony. 'It was Stanley's favorite typeface. It's sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers too. Clean and elegant.''Is this the kind of thing you and Kubrick used to talk about?' I asked.'God, yes,' says Tony. 'Sometimes late into the night. I was always trying to persuade him to turn away from them. But he was wedded to his sans serifs.

~ Jon Ronson

A terrified-looking bystander, a nerdy man in a sweater, calls the police and stammers into the phone: 'A huge group of people are fighting and there's pepper spray and superheroes and I don't know.

~ Jon Ronson

[W]e need to think twice about raining down vengeance and anger as our default position.

~ Jon Ronson

The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

~ Jon Ronson

This place is packed with beautiful hipsters. While the Coney Island bombast radiated sincerity, everything here seems more ironic. When someone in the crowd ironically chants, 'USA!' someone else ironically chants back, 'Mother Russia.

~ Jon Ronson

I didn't want to write a book that advocated for a less curious world. Prurient curiosity may not be great. But curiosity is. People's flaws need to be written about. The flaws of some people lead to horrors inflicted on others. And then there are the more human flaws that, when you shine a light onto them, de-demonize people who might otherwise be seen as ogres.

~ Jon Ronson

Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?

~ Jon Ronson

I wondered what sort of woman loved a man like that.

~ Jon Ronson

Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.

~ Jon Ronson

It seems to me that all the people involved in the Hank and Adria story thought they were doing something good. But they only revealed that our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow, that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks.

~ Jon Ronson

When shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes, nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

~ Jon Ronson

[W]e all care deeply about things that seem totally inconsequential to other people. We all carry around with us the flotsam and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. We are a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them?

~ Jon Ronson

Soon after Justine Sacco's shaming, I was talking with a friend, a journalist, who told me he had so many jokes, little observations, potentially risqué thoughts, that he wouldn't dare to post online anymore.'I suddenly feel with social media like I'm tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment,' he said. 'It's horrible.'He didn't want me to name him, he said, in case it sparked something off.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 of it.

~ Jon Ronson

I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we've created a stage for constant artificial high drama.

~ Jon Ronson

I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read DSM-IV when you're not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.

~ Jon Ronson

There's a societal push for conformity in all ways. There's less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. (interview with Allen Frances)

~ Jon Ronson

I kept remembering something Michael Fertik had said to me at the Village Pub in Woodside. 'The biggest lie,' he said, 'is The Internet is about you. We like to think of ourselves as people who have choice and taste and personalized content. But the Internet isn't about us. It's about the companies that dominate the data flows of the Internet.

~ Jon Ronson

We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

~ 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.

~ Jon Ronson

There's definitely evidence that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior. When you look at the worst corners of the American health insurance industry or the sub-prime banking market, it really feels like the more psychopathically someone behaves, the more it's rewarded.

~ Jon Ronson