Jon Ronson Quotes

Once a person has killed other people on behalf of an ideology, he becomes rather devoted to it.

I'm not frightened about terrorism. I'm frightened about the roots of what we call terrorism.

We must find out where the roots of terrorism lie.

Terrorist groups always want to believe that they represent a general aggrieved group far larger than they really do.

As someone who grew up between two cultures, I have been fascinated with the question of why men and women with similar backgrounds to mine were drawn towards radical messages of hate and violence.

Some politicians were probably too lax about the rise of an extremist, fundamentalist, radical ideology.

The themes that I explore, Taika Waititi also explores: how teaching children a sense of 'us and them' breeds a sense of superiority and dehumanises what one perceives as 'otherness'; and why this theme is relevant to today's rise in the far-Right, how children and youth are indoctrinated into extremism and terrorism.

I don't just want to show how somebody might be wrong;I want to know why people believe the things they believe in the first place. I want to understand the mindset that would lead somebody toward the alt-right.

I'm interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.

I don't know if people are born with a worldview or if their thinking is a product of their environment.

At some point in the last 20 years, the left moved to the center, and the right moved into a mental institution.

Fanatics can justify practically any atrocity to themselves. The more untenable their position becomes, the harder they hold to it, and the worse the things they are willing to do to support it.

Most of the time when couples argue, it’s not really about the thing they’re fighting about; there’s a deeper reason why they’re arguing.

A fanatic's willingness to kill or be killed in the service of a cause cannot prove the rightness of that cause.

There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. [Adolf] Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].

The more fantastic an ideology or theology, the more fanatic its adherents.

The future of a movement is conditioned by the fanaticism, yes, the intolerance, with which its adherents uphold it as the sole correct movement, and push it past other formations of a similar sort.

I don't believe that either fascism or communism is the solution or that they may come back on this earth.

The jihadists ideology cannot be wiped out with force much less killed. You know, unless we understand the root causes of this, we're going to perpetuate this violence over and over again.

We need to be aware of all different forms of brainwashing and radicalization.

When ideas lead to ideology, that's a very dangerous thing. Ideology then leads to creating the image of an enemy, and it leads to the murder and massacre.

Terrorism is based on two major pillars: One is injustice, and the other is a certainty of attitude, the notion that their version of the story is the correct one.

The more aggressive our ideologies become, the more aggressive our discourse whether it's in the United States, from Washington D.C., or whether it's from Tehran, or from some underground Al-Qaeda cell. The more aggressive that discourse is, the more people of moderate persuasion have to organize and speak a voice of compassion. That means to feel with the other.

That extremes beget extremes is an apothegm built on the most profound observation of the human mind.

Extremists on the left tend to be just as critical of pragmatism as extremists on the right.