28 Quotes by Jonathan Sims

Some of the smartest people there were also the most committed. Intelligence doesn’t make you less prone to taking on bad ideas, it just makes you better at defending them to other people and to yourself. Smart people can believe some truly ridiculous things, and then deploy all the reason and logic at their disposal to justify them, because a belief doesn’t begin in your mind. It begins in your feelings.

Right, well. If I’m just another cog, maybe I can’t leave the machine, but from this moment I’m not turning. I’m jammed.

Nice to see Gertrude also used to get a lot of threats. So far, it doesn’t seem that any of them went desperately well, except for Elias, of course, but he didn’t threaten, did he, just...did it.

Jumping on a grenade is only heroic if you weren’t the one who actually threw it.

Free of what? We all have forces that drive us, circumstances that direct us, and even if we choose to ignore these and act against all logic, just to prove that we can – is that not simply allowing the existential terror of our own powerlessness to control us instead?

Cults are very good at finding you when you’re at your lowest point, when you’re your most emotionally vulnerable. And when you’re at that point it’s astounding what can crawl into your heart and start to fester there.

Everyone thinks they’re too smart to get involved in a cult. I’m sure you do.You think that, of the first mention of aliens, or the end of the world, or the lost book of the Bible where Jesus buried his holy staff in the foothills of the Himalayas, you’d go running.Trouble is, that misunderstands how it works

Doesn’t even need to tell you any lies – just waits for the lies you tell yourself.

I was… so sure I’d find something up there. But instead it was just another broken person trying to come to terms with the wreckage of their life.