100 Quotes by Johann Hari

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.

The greatest trick the rich – and their cheerleaders on the right – ever pulled was convincing the world that class didn’t exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.

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.

There is an emerging scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes more intense and more destructive. It turns out that Katrina fits into a pattern that scientists and greens have been trying to warn us about for a long time.

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 Italian philosopher Paolo Virno says we have moved from having a “proletariat” – a solid block of manual workers with jobs – to a “precariat,” a shifting mass of chronically insecure people who don’t know whether they will have any work next week and may never have a stable job.

The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War.

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

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