Top 140 Johann Hari Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.”

— Johann Hari

2. “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.”

— Johann Hari

3. “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.”

— Johann Hari

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

— Johann Hari

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

— Johann Hari

6. “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.”

— Johann Hari

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

— Johann Hari

8. “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?”

— Johann Hari

9. “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.”

— Johann Hari

10. “I respect you as a person too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs.”

— Johann Hari

11. “To end loneliness, you need other people – plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you. You have to be in it together – and “it” can be anything that you both think has meaning and value.”

— Johann Hari

12. “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.”

— Johann Hari

13. “How do we start to rebuild a society where we don’t feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption?”

— Johann Hari

14. “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.”

— Johann Hari

15. “We have been systematically misinformed about what depression and anxiety are.”

— Johann Hari

16. “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.”

— Johann Hari

17. “All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do.”

— Johann Hari

18. “We grieve because we have loved. We grieve because the person we have lost mattered to us. To say that grief should disappear on a neat timetable is an insult to the love we felt.”

— Johann Hari

19. “The scientific evidence is clear that exercise significantly reduces depression and anxiety.”

— Johann Hari

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

— Johann Hari

21. “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.”

— Johann Hari

22. “Materialism is KFC for the soul.”

— Johann Hari

23. “I’ve pursued happiness for myself my whole life, and I’m exhausted, and I don’t feel any closer to it – because where does it end? The bar just keeps getting moved.”

— Johann Hari

24. “Depression isn’t a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences!”

— Johann Hari

25. “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.”

— Johann Hari

26. “The Internet was born into a world where many people had already lost their sense of connection to each other. The collapse had already been taking place for decades by then. The web arrived offering them a kind of parody of what they were losing – Facebook friends in place of neighbors, video games in place of meaningful work, status updates in place of status in the world. The comedian Marc Maron once wrote that “every status update is a just a variation on a single request: ‘Would someone please acknowledge me?”

— Johann Hari

27. “When they talk among themselves, advertising people have been admitting since the 1920s that their job is to make people feel inadequate – and then offer their product as the solution to the sense of inadequacy they have created.”

— Johann Hari

28. “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.”

— Johann Hari

29. “The symptoms are a messenger of a deeper problem. Let’s get to the deeper problem.”

— Johann Hari

30. “Antidepressant drugs that increase serotonin in the brain have the same modest effect, in clinical trials, as drugs that reduce serotonin in the brain.”

— Johann Hari

31. “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.”

— Johann Hari

32. “But then I contrast this evidence with the evidence from Portugal. More people used drugs, yet addiction fell substantially. Why? Because punishment – shaming a person, caging them, making them unemployable – traps them in addiction. Taking that money and spending it instead on helping them to get jobs and homes and decent lives makes it possible for many of them to.”

— Johann Hari

33. “Materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety.”

— Johann Hari

34. “Disempowerment,” Michael told me, “is at the heart of poor health” – physical, mental, and emotional.”

— Johann Hari

35. “It took me a while to see that the contrast between the racism directed at Billie and the compassion offered to addicted white stars like Judy Garland was not some weird misfiring of the drug war – it was part of the point.”

— Johann Hari

36. “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.”

— Johann Hari

37. “Nearly twice as many people hate their jobs as love their jobs.”

— Johann Hari

38. “The primary explanation for depression offered in our culture starts to fall apart. The idea you feel terrible because of a “chemical imbalance” was built on a series of mistakes and errors. It has come as close to being proved wrong, he told me, as you ever get in science. It’s lying broken on the floor, like a neurochemical Humpty Dumpty with a very sad smile.”

— Johann Hari

39. “This showed that loneliness isn’t just some inevitable human sadness, like death. It’s a product of the way we live now.”

— Johann Hari

40. “You can’t escape it: when scientists test the water supply of Western countries, they always find it is laced with antidepressants, because so many of us are taking them and excreting them that they simply can’t be filtered out of the water we drink every day. We are literally awash in these drugs.”

— Johann Hari

41. “Despair often happens, he had learned, when there is a “lack of balance between efforts and rewards.”

— Johann Hari

42. “Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.”

— Johann Hari

43. “The more you think life is about having stuff and superiority and showing it off, the more unhappy, and the more depressed and anxious, you will be.”

— Johann Hari

44. “Your working assumption, when you meet a homophobe, should be that they are gay.”

— Johann Hari

45. “They wanted easy answers to complex fears.”

— Johann Hari

46. “When alcohol was legalized again in 1933, the involvement of gangsters and murderers and killing in the alcohol trade virtually ended. Peace was restored to the streets of Chicago. The murder rate fell dramatically,25 and it didn’t rise so high again until drug prohibition was intensified in the 1970s and ’80s.”

— Johann Hari

47. “The addicts started to insist on being at every meeting where drug policy was discussed. They took a slogan from the movements of psychiatric patients who were fighting to be treated decently: “Nothing about us, without us.” Their message was: We’re here. We’re human. We’re alive. Don’t talk about us as if we are nothing.”

— Johann Hari

48. “It occurred to me as I walked up and down those Lisbon streets that we all – the vast majority of drug warriors, and the vast majority of legalizers – have a set of shared values. We all want to protect children from drugs. We all want to keep people from dying as a result of drug use. We all want to reduce addiction. And now the evidence strongly suggests that when we move beyond the drug war, we will be able to achieve those shared goals with much greater success.”

— Johann Hari

49. “For anybody who suspects that we need to reform the drug laws, there is an easier argument to make, and a harder argument to make. The easier argument is to say that we all agree drugs are bad – it’s just that drug prohibition is even worse.”

— Johann Hari

50. “I wondered if the motto for our era should be: I tried to live, but I got distracted.”

— Johann Hari