Top 150 Jon Ronson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I’ve started seeing it everywhere.”

— Jon Ronson

2. “Success is always less funny than failure.”

— Jon Ronson

3. “We were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland.”

— Jon Ronson

4. “Capitalism, at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy.”

— Jon Ronson

5. “Friends are the fruitcake of life – some nutty, some soaked in alcohol, some sweet.”

— Jon Ronson

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

— Jon Ronson

7. “The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.”

— Jon Ronson

8. “I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.”

— Jon Ronson

9. “Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.”

— Jon Ronson

10. “There’s definitely evidence that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior. When you look at the worst corners of the American health insurance industry or the sub-prime banking market, it really feels like the more psychopathically someone behaves, the more it’s rewarded.”

— Jon Ronson

11. “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

— Jon Ronson

12. “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.”

— Jon Ronson

13. “Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I’ve always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn’t? What if it is built on insanity?”

— Jon Ronson

14. “I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read DSM-IV when you’re not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.”

— Jon Ronson

15. “Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.”

— Jon Ronson

16. “The laughing way we make damaged people our playthings, it’s so dehumanizing.”

— Jon Ronson

17. “It’s not a good idea to define the boundaries of normality by tearing apart people who are outside of it.”

— Jon Ronson

18. “It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a ‘feeling’, for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness.”

— Jon Ronson

19. “No, people back home don’t realize why there is this kind of need for heroes in America at the moment. People in Britain don’t really understand what’s going on here. They don’t understand why Camp X-ray exists.”

— Jon Ronson

20. “Feeling no remorse must be a blessing when all you have are your memories.”

— Jon Ronson

21. “I feel that a really public shaming or humiliation is a conflict between the person trying to write his own narrative and society trying to write a different narrative for that person. One story tries to overwrite the other and so to survive you have to own your story.”

— Jon Ronson

22. “A life had been ruined. What was it for: just some social media drama? I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It’s all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people.”

— Jon Ronson

23. “But with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain.”

— Jon Ronson

24. “But we know that people are complicated and have a mixture of flaws and talents and sins. So why do we pretend that we don’t?”

— Jon Ronson

25. “Maybe there are two types of people in the world: those who favour humans over ideology, and those who favour ideology over humans. I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they’re creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain.”

— Jon Ronson

26. “We’re creating a culture where people feel constantly surveilled, where people are afraid to be themselves.”

— Jon Ronson

27. “We want to see ourselves as curious and open-minded and smart and understanding things in terms of context and nuance, but when someone tries to do that in the midst of a shaming they’re turned on.”

— Jon Ronson

28. “How you feed your family is not how we feed our family. For real. We’re not out here just for the fun and just for the show-and-tell. This is real life.” I am finding myself ostentatiously nodding at everything the crack dealers are saying, I suppose in the hope that if the shooting starts they’ll remember my nods and make the effort to shoot around me.”

— Jon Ronson

29. “Shame internalized can lead to agony. Whereas shame let out can lead to freedom, or at least a funny story, which is a sort of freedom too.”

— Jon Ronson

30. “As somebody back then wrote, “Facebook is where you lie to your friends, Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers.”

— Jon Ronson

31. “I’d been beguiled by the new technology – a toddler crawling toward a gun.”

— Jon Ronson

32. “If anyone should change their behaviour, I thought, it ought to be those doing the shaming.”

— Jon Ronson

33. “Maybe – as my friend the documentary maker Adam Curtis emailed me – they’re turning social media into ‘a giant echo chamber where what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing.’ We express our opinion that Justine Sacco is a monster. We are instantly congratulated for this – for basically being Rosa Parks. We make the on-the-spot decision to carry on believing it.”

— Jon Ronson

34. “An apology is supposed to be a communion – a coming together. For someone to make an apology, someone has to be listening. They listen and you speak and there’s an exchange. That’s why we have a thing about accepting apologies.”

— Jon Ronson

35. “There is nothing I dislike more in the world than people who care more about ideology than they do about people.”

— Jon Ronson

36. “We’re living in post-nuance online times.”

— Jon Ronson

37. “That’s what I Am a Strange Loop is about,” said Deborah. “It’s about how we spend our lives self-referencing, over and over, in a kind of strange loop.”

— Jon Ronson

38. “So, yeah, the psychopath might cry when his dog dies and you think that’s misplaced because he doesn’t cry when his daughter dies.” I.”

— Jon Ronson

39. “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.”

— Jon Ronson

40. “But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,’ I said. ‘Serial killers ruin families,’ shrugged Bob. ‘Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”

— Jon Ronson

41. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”

— Jon Ronson

42. “Sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.”

— Jon Ronson

43. “I am the neurological opposite of a psychopath, in that I feel anxious almost all the time. It must be great to not constantly feel like you’ve got someone living inside your face, shooting you with a mini Taser.”

— Jon Ronson

44. “A crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. Exaggerate, affirm, resort to repetition, and never attempt to prove anything by reasoning.”

— Jon Ronson

45. “My worryingly paradoxical thought process could be summarized thus: Thank God I don’t believe in the secret rulers of the world. Imagine what the secret rulers of the world might do to me if I did!”

— Jon Ronson

46. “We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it.”

— Jon Ronson

47. “You combine insecurity and ambition, and you get an inability to say no to things.”

— Jon Ronson

48. “My paranoia never ends, but I haven’t been paranoid about being spied on my shadowy forces for some time now.”

— Jon Ronson

49. “I write funny nonfiction adventure books about crazy, serious worlds.”

— Jon Ronson

50. “I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be.”

— Jon Ronson