255 Quotes by Jon Ronson

So you faked it to give Zimbardo a better study?” I asked. “It was completely deliberate on my part,” he replied. “I planned it. I mapped it out. I carried it through. It was all done for a purpose. I thought I was doing something good at the time.

All over the world, famous people began declaring themselves LeBon fans. Like Mussolini: “I have read all the work of Gustave LeBon and I don’t know how many times I have reread The Crowd. It is a capital work to which, to this day, I frequently refer.” And Goebbels: “Goebbels thinks that no one since the Frenchman LeBon has understood the mind of the masses as well as he,” wrote Goebbels’s aide Rudolf Semmler in his wartime diary.

A lot of people move around in life chronically ashamed of how they look, or how they feel, or what they said, or what they did. It’s like a permanent adolescent concern. Adolescence is when you’re permanently concerned about what other people think of you.

One man was saying, ‘It cost me a new SUV for my wife,’” Andrew said. “Another said, ‘It cost me a cruise to the Bahamas and a new kitchen.’ Everyone was laughing.

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.

Their puffed-out cheeks are beetroot-red, making them resemble sweaty, meat-smeared squirrels.

As a group they tend to be more charming than most people,” she said. “They have no warm emotions of their own but will study the rest of us.

If I had a spouse and two kids to support I certainly would not be telling ‘jokes’ like he was doing at a conference.

Clive’s point was that the criminal justice system is supposed to repair harm, but most prisoners – young, black – have been incarcerated for acts far less emotionally damaging than the injuries we noncriminals perpetrate upon one another all the time – bad husbands, bad wives, ruthless bosses, bullies, bankers.