Top 150 Jon Ronson Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Jon Ronson

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

— Jon Ronson

53. “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.”

— Jon Ronson

54. “You keep staying on our block we gonna have to show you what the burner do.” “Thank you, it’s great meeting you,” says Phoenix. “What’s a burner?” I whisper. “A gun,” Phoenix whispers back. The man loops and rejoins the others. The streets are deserted. It’s just the dealers and us. But then, miraculously, a taxi passes. I flag it. The superheroes all have bulletproof vests. I have nothing. I have a cardigan.”

— Jon Ronson

55. “In the midst of a burning-hot shaming, calling for patience and context and understanding and empathy can really land you in trouble.”

— Jon Ronson

56. “I understood why parents would want to do that, but it wasn’t the message I was going for. If anyone should change their behaviour, I thought, it ought to be those doing the shaming. Justine’s crime had been a badly worded joke mocking privilege. To see the catastrophe as her fault felt to me a little like ‘Don’t wear short skirts’. It felt like victim-blaming.”

— Jon Ronson

57. “Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that.”

— Jon Ronson

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

— Jon Ronson

59. “TV is just troubled people being booed these days.”

— Jon Ronson

60. “You can say anything to David Icke and he will accept it and put it into his ideology.”

— Jon Ronson

61. “Serial killers ruin families,’ shrugged Bob. ‘Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”

— Jon Ronson

62. “We don’t want obvious exploitation. We want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.”

— Jon Ronson

63. “I wasn’t in any way a kind of soothsayer or not surprised when Sept. 11 happened. I was absolutely shocked.”

— Jon Ronson

64. “I think we all care deeply about things that seem totally inconsequential to other people. We all carry around with us the flotsam and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. We are a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them?”

— Jon Ronson

65. “Was he right? It felt like a question that really needed answering because it didn’t seem to be crossing any of our minds to wonder whether the person we had just shamed was okay or in ruins. I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.”

— Jon Ronson

66. “As soon as the victim steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed,” he said, “the whole thing crumbles.”

— Jon Ronson

67. “It felt as if the people on Twitter had been invited to be characters in a courtroom drama, and had been allowed to choose their roles, and had all gone for the part of the hanging judge. Or it was even worse than that. They all had gone for the part of the people in the lithographs being ribald at whippings.”

— Jon Ronson

68. “I didn’t want to write a book that advocated for a less curious world. Prurient curiosity may not be great. But curiosity is. People’s flaws need to be written about. The flaws of some people lead to horrors inflicted on others. And then there are the more human flaws that, when you shine a light onto them, de-demonize people who might otherwise be seen as ogres.”

— Jon Ronson

69. “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.”

— Jon Ronson

70. “The way I portrayed the people is accurate. Because they’re human beings and we have a kind of wonderful capacity to be absurd and ridiculous.”

— Jon Ronson

71. “Of course there are people who would like to eat breakfast without the screams of toddlers all around them, but those people should get over themselves and stop being stuck up and idiotic.”

— Jon Ronson

72. “Manipulative?” I said. “I think you could describe that as leadership,” he said. “Inspire! I think it’s called leadership.” “Are.”

— Jon Ronson

73. “I suspect it was probably unusual to suffer from both Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Malingering, unproductiveness tending to make me feel anxious, but there it was. I had both.”

— Jon Ronson

74. “I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body perfectly, everything smooth and sleek and luxurious, and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of torture- like she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy.”

— Jon Ronson

75. “She chuckled to herself, pressed send, and wandered around the airport for half an hour, sporadically checking Twitter. “I got nothing,” she told me. “No replies.” I imagined her feeling a bit deflated about this – that sad feeling when nobody congratulates you for being funny, that black silence when the Internet doesn’t talk back.”

— Jon Ronson

76. “He had experienced only kindness and forgiveness. Actually, it wasn’t kindness and forgiveness. It was something much better than that. It was nothing. He experienced nothing.”

— Jon Ronson

77. “We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we’d never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.”

— Jon Ronson

78. “He hosted a series of lunches – Les Dejeuners de Gustave Le Bon – for politicians and prominent society people. He’d sit at the head of the table with a bell by his side. If one of his guests said something he disagreed with he’d pick up the bell and ring it relentlessly until the person stopped talking.”

— Jon Ronson

79. “Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of normal,” said Allen Frances.”

— Jon Ronson

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

— Jon Ronson

81. “Well, I had nightmares when I was doing the Klan story all the time. I had a recurring nightmare of basically being exposed as a Jew inside the Klan compound.”

— Jon Ronson

82. “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.”

— Jon Ronson

83. “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

84. “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. He.”

— Jon Ronson

85. “There are obviously a lot of very ill people out there. But there are also people in the middle, getting overlabeled, becoming nothing more than a big splurge of madness in the minds of the people who benefit from it.”

— Jon Ronson

86. “Oh, you know what bloggers are like, they write and write and write. I don’t know why, because they’re not being paid.”

— Jon Ronson

87. “But at the core of psychopathy is a lack of moral restraint.”

— Jon Ronson

88. “I consider it somewhat psychopathic to label someone from afar as a psychopath. We love nothing more than to declare other people insane, especially people we don’t like.”

— Jon Ronson

89. “I saw at least one analysis of the experiment where the author seemed to find it perfectly plausible that if a person was overcome by a violent madness he’d involuntarily start to sound like someone from Louisiana.”

— Jon Ronson

90. “The powerful, crazy, cruel people were now us. It felt like we were soldiers making war on other people’s flaws, and there had suddenly been an escalation in hostilities.”

— Jon Ronson

91. “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.”

— Jon Ronson

92. “He fulfilled the bipolar checklist. See? And so they gave him some pretty heavy-duty medication. It slowed him way down, to a drooling fat kid. And they declared the meds a success.” It.”

— Jon Ronson

93. “I have thought sometimes that the sanest people, the people who are just very balanced, very happy, are probably lower achieving than other people. My kind of irrationality happens to be fear or anxiety.”

— Jon Ronson

94. “Social scientists have written papers analyzing Eshelman’s every move in there, including the strange detail that the more brutally he behaved, the more American South his accent sounded.”

— Jon Ronson

95. “We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age.”

— Jon Ronson

96. “For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers.”

— Jon Ronson

97. “I would also say you can never reduce any person to a diagnostic label.”

— Jon Ronson

98. “It wasn’t easy to learn about Gustave LeBon. For being the father of such an enduring theory, almost nothing has been written about him. Only one man has ever tried to piece his life story together – Bob Nye, a professor of European intellectual history at Oregon State University.”

— Jon Ronson

99. “Maybe it was the trying so hard to be normal that was making everyone so afraid they were going crazy.”

— Jon Ronson

100. “When shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes, nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.”

— Jon Ronson