100 Quotes by Johann Hari

Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you – it’s the cage you live in.

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.

The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection. It’s all I can offer. It’s all that will help him in the end. If you are alone, you cannot escape addiction. If you are loved, you have a chance. For a hundred years we have been singing war songs about addicts. All along, we should have been singing love songs to them.

All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do.

Something has gone badly wrong with our culture. We’ve created a culture where really large numbers of the people around us can’t bear to be present in their daily lives. They need to medicate themselves to get through their day.

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

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

When work is enriching, life is fuller, and that spills over into the things you do outside work,” he said to me. But “when it’s deadening,” you feel “shattered at the end of the day, just shattered.

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?