255 Quotes by Jon Ronson

He said his worst days were when he allowed himself to hope for a second chance. The best were when he knew it was over forever and his destruction was necessary as a deterrent to others. I.

It’s a lot harder to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy.

We don’t want obvious exploitation. We want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.

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!

As soon as the victim steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed,” he said, “the whole thing crumbles.

Judge Ted Poe’s critics – like the civil rights group the ACLU – argued to him the dangers of these ostentatious punishments, especially those that were carried out in public. They said it was no coincidence that public shaming had enjoyed such a renaissance in Mao’s China and Hitler’s Germany and the Ku Klux Klan’s America – it destroys souls, brutalizing everyone, the onlookers included, dehumanizing them as much as the person being shamed.

He hosted a series of lunches – Les Dejeuners de Gustave Le Bon – for politicians and prominent society people. He’d sit at the head of the table with a bell by his side. If one of his guests said something he disagreed with he’d pick up the bell and ring it relentlessly until the person stopped talking.

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.

Serial killers ruin families,’ shrugged Bob. ‘Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.