Quotes by Jon Ronson - Page 2

Discover the time of day when you write best, and write then. For me it's about 7 am to noon. For other people it's overnight. Try not to do anything other than write between those times.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Noon
People
Trying
Writing
Best Time Me
Discover
Overnight
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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 / Journalist
Breakfast
Idiotic
People
Scream
Stuck
Eat Breakfast
Toddlers
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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 / Journalist
Believe
Secret
Thank God
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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 / Journalist
Smart
Trying
Understanding
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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 / Journalist
Anxiety
Balanced
Irrationality
Kind
People
Achieving
Fear People Sometimes
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What I think was a really lucky coincidence was that a lot of the themes of 'Okja' are things I write about a lot: cognitive dissonance and corporate greed and also the internal politics of fringe groups.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Cognitive
Corporate
Fringe
Greed
Lucky
Internal
Themes
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Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Bohemian
Cracks
Grove
Narrative
Obvious
Pretentious
Slave
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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 / Journalist
Adventure
Bad Things
Littles
Neurotic
Personal Life
Trying
Accumulate
Life Me Bad
Adventures
Uniquely
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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 / Journalist
Home
America
Britain
Hero
Heroes
Camp
Exists
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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 / Journalist
Opposites
Shooting
Tasers
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'Okja' I don't think would have been made if Netflix hadn't made it. That, to me, is a much bigger thing than whether someone watches it on a big screen or a phone. Because it simply wouldn't have existed otherwise.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Big Screen
Watches
Existed
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I did feel like they were telling me that something like that was going to happen. Not specifically - not that planes were going to be flown into the World Trade Center or anything like that - but in the general sense.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Planes
World Trade
World Trade Center
World Me Feel
Center
Flown
General Sense
Specifically
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On social media there's this thing where on many occasions, there's a single proscribed way of acting. Like if somebody dies, everyone has to say "R.I.P.! R.I.P.!" Basically they're saying, "Don't hurt me, I'm a good person."
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Acting
Hurt
Media
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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 / Journalist
Mad
People
Personality
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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 / Journalist
Impact
Insanity
What If
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My ideal world was the early days of Twitter, where everyone was curious about each other and everyone saw it as kind of a window into people's lives where we could be compassionate and curious and empathetic and we could tell each other secrets.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
People
Secret
World
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Somebody told me, “Twitter hates tabloids, but Twitter is constantly acting like a tabloid, repeating the mistakes of the things we’re hoping to better.” Twitter wanted to become a more egalitarian justice system, but instead it became a draconian one.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Acting
Hate
Mistake
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The phrase 'misuse of privilege' is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. It's becoming a devalued term, and it's making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Becoming
Capacity
Misuse
Serious
Term
Transgression
Free
Pretty
Anybody
Between
Choose
Devalued
Distinguishing
Lose
Making
Pass
Phrase
Tear
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I felt very strongly about the Ashley Madison thing. Of the 39 million people who signed up for Ashley Madison, only a tiny percentage of them actually had an affair. And I'd go a step further and say even if they did, it's none of our business, frankly.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Business
Affair
Ashley
Madison
Tiny
Actually
Did
Frankly
Further
Million
Million People
None
Percentage
Signed
Step
Strongly
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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 / Journalist
Relationship
Childhood
Understanding
Childhoods
Extremists
Symbiotic
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Shaming is powerful and useful. I'm living in New York, and my instinct is that, after the Black Lives Matter protests, which were organized on social media, the chance of there being another Eric Garner, choked to death in New York by an NYPD officer, has diminished.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Instinct
Nypd
Organized
Social Media
Choked
Diminished
Garner
Officer
Protests
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When I asked Robert Spitzer about the possibility that he'd inadvertently created a world in which ordinary behaviours were being labelled mental disorders, he fell silent. I waited for him to answer. But the silence lasted three minutes. Finally he said, 'I don't know.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Ordinary
Silence
Three
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I heard a story about her once,' said James. 'She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn't know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Faces
People
Stories
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In the early days of Twitter, it was like a place of radical de-shaming. People would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, 'Oh my God, I'm exactly the same.' Voiceless people realized that they had a voice, and it was powerful and eloquent.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Eloquent
Powerful
Radical
Shameful
Voice
Voiceless
Twitter
Admit
Oh
Days
God Voice People
Early
Early Days
Exactly
Exactly The Same
Place
Oh My God
Realized
Secrets
Themselves
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At the end of our conversation she (Martha Stout) turned to address you, the reader. She said if you're beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you're feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Anxiety
Feelings
Mean
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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 / Journalist
Health
Banking
Capitalism
Corners
Evidence
Feels
Industry
Looks
Rewards
Ruthless
Worst
Most
American
Behaves
Definitely
Look
Health Insurance
Insurance
Insurance Industry
Market
Rewarded
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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 / Journalist
Anxiety
Interesting
Personality
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There was a kind of infiniteness to fiction that I found sort of... disconcerting. I remember having these really panicky thoughts, like, 'I can make this person say anything. I could make him do anything! I could put a jetpack onto his back and shoot him into space!' I don't like this feeling of having no rules.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Disconcerting
No Rules
Onto
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I think if somebody is so set in their ways about what they feel about something - and you get this a lot in academia, of course, and also different sorts of journalism too - you're going to sweep under the carpet the facts that don't suit your thesis. And I think that happens quite a lot in the courtroom, for instance.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Academia
Carpet
Courtroom
Different
Instance
Journalism
Thesis
Thinking
Quite A Lot
Suit
Sweep
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When I was 20, I wrote a film on spec and sent it to the BBC. They wrote back, 'Usually, when we reject submissions, we like to offer some encouragement, but in your case, we don't see any point in you continuing.' I took it as encouragement anyway, thinking that only people who write terrible things are capable of writing great things.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Encouragement
Capable
Continuing
Great Things
Bbc
Great Thinking People
Reject
Submissions
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It is slightly chilling to realize there are rational, functional people up there employed to spot, nurture, and exploit those down here among us who are irrational and can barely cope. If you want to know how stupid you’re perceived to be by the people up there, count the unsolicited junk mail you receive. If you get a lot, you’re perceived to be alluringly stupid.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Junk
People
Stupid
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A strange thing happens when you interview a robot. You feel an urge to be profound: to ask profound questions. I suppose it’s an inter-species thing. Although if it is I wonder why I never try and be profound around my dog. ‘What does electricity taste like?’ I ask. ‘Like a planet around a star,’ Bina48 replies. Which is either extraordinary or meaningless - I’m not sure which
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Dog
Profound
Stars
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Guy Savelli's role in the War on Terror began when half-a-dozen strangers, within days of one another, contacted him via e-mail and telephone in the winter of 2003. They asked him if he had the power to psychically kill goats. Guy was bewildered. He did not go around publicizing this. Who were these men? How did they know about the goats? He feigned a casual tone of voice and said, 'Sure I can.'Then he phoned Special Forces.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Men
War
Winter
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As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.
Jon Ronson / Journalist
Ambition
Hate
Writing
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Jon Ronson Quotes - Page 2

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