Quotes by Jon Ronson

“No. Spiritual is the wrong word. Hes occultic. Hes like a walking embodiment of death. He can stop you at a distance. He can influence physical events just with his mind. If he catches your attention he can stop you without touching you.”

“In April 2001, Bert Rodriguez took on a new student. His name was Ziad Jarrah. Ziad just turned up at the US 1 Fitness Center one day and said he had heard that Bert was good. Why Ziad chose Bert, of all the martial arts instructors scattered around the Florida shoreline, is a matter of speculation. Maybe Berts uniquely occultic reputation preceded him, or perhaps it was Berts military connections. Plus, Bert had once taught the head of security for a Saudi prince. Maybe that was it.”

“I was always out to paint them with human characteristics we could relate to. They really are, by and large, personable in the flesh.”

“When David says that 12-foot blood-drinking child-sacrificing pedophile lizards secretly rule the world, he really is referring to lizards.”

“I certainly believe the Weavers were utterly innocent, were a threat to nobody, and if you cant believe crazy things on top of a mountain in Idaho, where can you believe crazy things?”

“[There was the Arkansas Klansman Thom Robb, for example, who couldnt quite figure out where he fit in.] He wanted to give the Klan an image makeover, by banning the robes and the hoods and the N word -- as he always called it ... and hatred in general, ... even though his members were always sidling up to him and whispering, Uh, Thom, we kind of joined the Klan because we wanted to hate people.”

“[Rachel, in particular,] was wise beyond her years, ... I think that if Rachel had been raised in North London, shed be going to Starbucks and studying at art school and voting for Tony Blair.”

“They said, Come on, who would you rather have living next to you? The crazy white-separatist Weavers or a family of respected FBI agents? ... The only answer I could come up with was, Whichever one plays their music quieter.”

There is no evidence that weve 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.

Please ejaculate, I silently urged the man, so I can go to sleep. (In this way I imagine I was like millions of women before me

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.

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.

Psychopaths [make] the world go around...society [is] an expression of that particular sort of madness...Ive always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isnt? What if it is built on insanity?

The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99...There are currently 374 mental disorders. I bought the book...and leafed through it...I closed the manual. I wonder if Ive got any of the 374 mental disorders, I thought. I opened the manual again. And instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.

Oh, you know what bloggers are like, they write and write and write. I dont know why, because theyre not being paid.

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

sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.

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

I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and theyre 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 thats not how we should define our fellow humans. Whats 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 - thats democracy.The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. Lets not turn it into a world where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.

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, Youre a failure!