Top 85 Quotes & Sayings by Jon Ronson

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Welsh journalist Jon Ronson.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Jon Ronson is a British-American journalist, author, and filmmaker whose works include Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001), The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004), and The Psychopath Test (2011). He has been described as a gonzo journalist, becoming a faux-naïf character in his stories. He produces informal but sceptical investigations of controversial fringe politics and science. He has published nine books and his work has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, City Life and Time Out. He has made several BBC Television documentary films and two documentary series for Channel 4.

Welsh - Journalist | Born: May 10, 1967

Source: Wikipedia

The world outside Twitter was great. I read books. I reconnected with people I knew from real life and met them for drinks in person. Then I drifted back on to Twitter.

Jon Ronson

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

I'm much more interested in looking at our own failings than going to some faraway place and looking at their failings, thus making us feel good about ourselves.

Jon Ronson

I consider myself a social justice person.

Jon Ronson

Film people can be quite ruthless and tough. I think it's because the industry is filled with talented, driven people chasing nowhere near enough work.

Jon Ronson

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

When we watch courtroom dramas, we tend to identify with the kindhearted defense attorney, but give us the power, and we become like hanging judges.

Jon Ronson

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

My entry into screenwriting was not smooth.

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

'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

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

Jon Ronson

Maybe there's two types of people in the world: those people who favor humans over ideology, and those people who favor ideology over humans.

Jon Ronson

Success is always less funny than failure.

Jon Ronson

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

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

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

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

I really admire Nick Hornby - for example, the way that he can make ordinary stuff so beautiful!

Jon Ronson

Yeah, but in the end his followers take what they want from his philosophy. Maybe it doesn't matter what's going on in David Icke's mind. It's how other people take him.

Jon Ronson

Of course there's systemic misogyny in certain parts of our culture and systemic racism and a wider range of insults women have to face.

Jon Ronson

I just don't think I'm very good at fiction.

Jon Ronson

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

Everyone's constantly scrambling around trying to justify their own cruel behavior, trying to come up with psychological tricks to make themselves not feel bad.

Jon Ronson

Misuse of privilege is seen as the worst sin.

Jon Ronson

At first, I did stories on people who were maybe just eccentric. Omar was a natural progression from that.

Jon Ronson

But when I was doing the KKK I had constant nightmares of being exposed as a Jew and lynched by the Klan.

Jon Ronson

Film is like a casserole. Everybody is thrown into a pot, and we're all in it together.

Jon Ronson

The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people.

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson

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

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

Sometimes labeling is only useful, like with OCD. Once you're labeled you can be treated. On other occasions labeling leads to tyranny, like with childhood bipolar disorder in the U.S.

Jon Ronson

But on the extremist side I didn't get any rejections at all. Everyone agreed to talk to me.

Jon Ronson

Film isn't a meritocracy; there's no system ensuring the best screenplays get produced. It's a hustle.

Jon Ronson

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

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

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

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

I'm not what you'd call a fearless type of person.

Jon Ronson

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

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

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

Trying to solve the mystery is what I enjoy most about writing.

Jon Ronson

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

If I interview somebody for an hour, I'm looking for four amazing minutes.

Jon Ronson

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

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

Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.

Jon Ronson

Trying to prove you’re not a psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you’re not mentally ill,’ said Tony.

Jon Ronson

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

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

Friends are the fruitcake of life - some nutty, some soaked in alcohol, some sweet.

Jon Ronson

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

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

Jon Ronson

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

?I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe.

Jon Ronson

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

The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

Jon Ronson

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

Jon Ronson