Top 140 Johann Hari Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “To the prohibitionists, Hannah is a failure, because she continued using drugs. To the Portland, she was a success, because she knew she was loved. One day, a very senior government minister came to visit the safe injection rooms, and to meet the addicts. He asked Liz: “What percentage of people who use this place would you consider to be write-offs?” She paused and looked at him, trying to figure out how to tell him that the answer is none.”

— Johann Hari

52. “It was only a long time into talking with these social scientists that I realized every one of the social and psychological causes of depression and anxiety they have discovered has something in common. They are all forms of disconnection. They are all ways in which we have been cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way.”

— Johann Hari

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

— Johann Hari

54. “More than 50 percent of Americans have breached the drug laws. Where a law is that widely broken, you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal – the poorest and most disliked groups. In the United States, they are black and Hispanic people, with a smattering of poor whites.”

— Johann Hari

55. “We are all born with a genetic inheritance – but your genes are activated by the environment. They can be switched on, or off, by what happens to you.”

— Johann Hari

56. “Rufus tells his patients when they come to him feeling deeply depressed or anxious: You’re not crazy to feel so distressed. You’re not broken. You’re not defective. He sometimes quotes the Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti,26 who explained: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.”

— Johann Hari

57. “Harry Anslinger is our own darkest impulses, given a government department and a license to kill.”

— Johann Hari

58. “Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack.”

— Johann Hari

59. “It’s not your fault you can’t focus. It’s by design. Your distraction is their fuel.”

— Johann Hari

60. “It turned out that for every category of traumatic experience you went through as a kid, you were radically more likely to become depressed as an adult. If you had six categories of traumatic events in your childhood, you were five times more likely to become depressed as an adult than somebody who didn’t have any. If you had seven categories of traumatic event as a child, you were 3,100 percent more likely to attempt to commit suicide as an adult.”

— Johann Hari

61. “When Billie Holiday came15 to London in the 1950s, she was amazed. They “are civilized about it and they have no narcotics problem at all,” she explained. “One day America is going to smarten up and do the.”

— Johann Hari

62. “Stop thinking only about individual recovery, he argues, and start thinking about “social recovery.”

— Johann Hari

63. “If I am an American who has developed an Oxycontin addiction, as soon as my doctor realizes I’m an addict, she has to cut me off. She is allowed to prescribe to treat only my physical pain – not my addiction. Indeed, if she prescribes just to meet my addiction, she will face being stripped of her license and up to twenty-five years in jail84 as a common drug dealer – just.”

— Johann Hari

64. “If we can figure out at the age of five which kids are going to be addicts and which ones aren’t, that tells us something fundamental about drug addiction. “Their relative maladjustment,” the study found, “precedes the initiation of drug use.” Indeed, “Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause, of personal and social maladjustment.”

— Johann Hari

65. “Later, one of the world’s leading medical journals, the Lancet, conducted a detailed study of the fourteen major antidepressants that are given to teenagers. The evidence – from the unfiltered, real results – showed that they simply didn’t work, with a single exception, where the effect was very small.”

— Johann Hari

66. “The Conservative government decided to “merge” John’s clinic with a new health trust, run by evangelical Christians who opposed prescription on principle. The patients panicked, because they knew what being cut off would mean – a return to abscesses and overdoses and scrambling for drugs from gangsters.”

— Johann Hari

67. “The vitally important corollary is that evolution shaped us not only to feel bad in isolation, but to feel insecure.” It’s a beautiful theory.”

— Johann Hari

68. “If I have too much luggage, too much property, too many material goods, that makes me worry I have to defend this stuff – then in that case I will not have time left to take care of the things I really love, and then I lose my freedom.”

— Johann Hari

69. “One friend told me that she always knew her depression was lifting when she felt her sense of time expanding again.”

— Johann Hari

70. “The first tugs towards prohibition were about power, and purity of belief. If you are going to have one God and one Church, you need to stop experiences that make people feel that they can approach God on their own.”

— Johann Hari

71. “Every single person reading this is the beneficiary of big civilizing social changes that seemed impossible when somebody first proposed them.”

— Johann Hari

72. “The United States now imprisons more people16 for drug offenses than Western European nations imprison for all crimes combined. No human society has ever before imprisoned this high a proportion of its population.”

— Johann Hari

73. “The damaged 10 percent, by contrast, are the only people we ever see using drugs out on the streets. The result is that the harmed 10 percent make up 100 percent of the official picture. It.”

— Johann Hari

74. “The bombs held in current nuclear arsenals are seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. If we don’t begin opposing the drift towards more and more of them, we will live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud for the rest of our lives – and millions may die there.”

— Johann Hari

75. “Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers.”

— Johann Hari

76. “I got my dad a great father’s Day present. He called to say: ‘Ach. Zis present is so good I now think it vas almost vorth having children.”

— Johann Hari

77. “Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause,20 of personal and social maladjustment.”

— Johann Hari

78. “They found that 13 percent of people say they are “engaged“ in their jobs – which means they are “enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and contribute to their organization in a positive manner.”

— Johann Hari

79. “The US head of state grew up on food stamps. The British head of state grew up on the postage stamps.”

— Johann Hari

80. “She had felt homesick. But she was at home.”

— Johann Hari

81. “Prohibition, Bourgois explains in his writing, creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded.”

— Johann Hari

82. “Wouldn’t it be better to spend our money on rescuing kids before they become addicts than on jailing them after we have failed?”

— Johann Hari

83. “When they added up the figures, John and other scientists found that being disconnected from the people around you had the same effect on your health as being obese – which was, until then, considered the biggest health crisis the developed world faced.”

— Johann Hari

84. “When the results came back4 and were all calculated out, Tim was struck by the results: materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety.”

— Johann Hari

85. “In the years since heroin was decriminalized in Portugal, its use has been halved there – while in the United States, where the drug war continues, it has doubled.28.”

— Johann Hari

86. “But why, then, do these ideas persist? Why haven’t the scientists with the better and more accurate ideas eclipsed these old theories? Hart tells me bluntly: Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war – and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications – why would governments want to fund those?”

— Johann Hari

87. “Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.”

— Johann Hari

88. “We are living, she has come to believe, in a culture where people are not “getting the connections that they need in order to be healthy human beings,” and that is why we can’t put down our smartphones, or bear to log off. We tell ourselves that we live so much of our lives in cyberspace because when we are there, we are connected – we are plugged into a swirling party with billions of people.”

— Johann Hari

89. “Caffeine blocks the receptor that picks up on the level of adenosine. “I liken it to putting a Post-it note over your fuel-gauge indicator. You’re not giving yourself more energy – you’re just not realizing how empty you are. When the caffeine wears off, you’re doubly exhausted.”

— Johann Hari

90. “The ocean makes you feel like the world is greeting you with a soft, wet, welcoming indifference. It’s never going to argue back, no matter how loud you yell.”

— Johann Hari

91. “A different study by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine – who I interviewed – observed how long on average an adult working in an office stays on one task. It was three minutes.”

— Johann Hari

92. “Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and your little ego – it loves you, it hates you, it’s talking about you right now. The ocean makes you feel like the world is greeting you with a soft, wet, welcoming indifference. It’s never going to argue back, no matter how loud you yell.”

— Johann Hari

93. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this crisis in paying attention has taken place at the same time as the worst crisis of democracy since the 1930s. People who can’t focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions – and less likely to see clearly when they fail. A world full of attention-deprived citizens alternating between Twitter and Snapchat will be a world of cascading crises where we can’t get a handle on any of them.”

— Johann Hari

94. “Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.”

— Johann Hari

95. “So, to find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities. Once you have created these conditions, and you hit flow, you can recognize it because it’s a distinctive mental state. You feel you are purely present in the moment. You experience a loss of self-consciousness. In this state it’s like your ego has vanished and you have merged with the task – like you are the rock you are climbing.”

— Johann Hari

96. “The average office worker now spends 40 percent of their work time wrongly believing they are “multitasking” – which means they are incurring all these costs for their attention and focus. In fact, uninterrupted time is becoming rare. One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day.”

— Johann Hari

97. “We live in a culture that is constantly amping us up with stress and stimulation.”

— Johann Hari

98. “The algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen.”

— Johann Hari

99. “At the start of the Second World War, the English poet W. H. Auden – when he looked out over the new technologies of destruction that had been created by humans – warned: “We must love one another, or die.”

— Johann Hari

100. “Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them.”

— Johann Hari