Paranoia Quotes

You have already lost if you are always fearful of losing everything.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

Who's they?" He wanted to know. "Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?""Every one of them," Yossarian told him."Every one of whom?""Every one of whom do you think?""I haven't any idea.""Then how do you know they aren't?""Because..." Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with frustration. tClevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn't know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn't funny at all.

True saddness is when someone still thinks your the same person after all these years. They brand you because of their own ego, fear and lack of spirituality. What's sadder is when they are Christian.

If you would know who controls you see who you may not criticise.

If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you get amateur security.

For a minute, the fantasy frightened her, but ultimately, this fear saved her from feeling alone.

Sadly, it seems that I have the proclivity to create plenty of devils, but most of the time I don’t even go looking for angels.

I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?

For the evil our government does, tinfoil hats are simply not required, and are indeed a detriment.

On the TV he found cartoons and movies, music videos and game shows, repeat broadcasts and reruns, but there was nothing current, and no news. Many channels were just blank, or displayed brightly coloured test cards.

It is not the homeless, mentally ill or extremely cunning people that we have to be afraid of. When someone loses everything that meant something to them is when people should get very afraid. A person that has nothing to lose is the scariest person on earth.

It’s all society is, the repressed sex drives of men, the objectification of women, their paranoia, the posturing, the macho stances, the beauty standard, it’s all just one charade masking a never ending hard on.

Paranoia is transmissible from mind to mind, but it does not go by the route of reason. It can therefore change its rationalization while remaining essentially the same.

The anticipation of loss is much more frightening than the actual loss as anticipation leaves room for the imagination to create that which, in all likelihood, will never transpire.

[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.

Jack missed the normality of merely reading the paper.

I hold the biscuits in front of his face and he stands up."What do I have to do?" he says."Nothing," I say. "They're for you.""Are they poisoned?" he says."No," I say."Eat one," he says.So I do."Probably the others are poisoned," he says. "Eat a fraction of each."I eat a corner off each biscuit. He looks at the reminders suspiciously, then sniffs them."I'm not sure it's worth it," he says. "How I wish you'd never come. Perhaps you've left the poison off of just those corners."I begin to realize I'll doubt whatever information he gives me."Lick the entire biscuit," he says. "Then give them to me."So I lick each biscuit."Both sides," he says.I lick both sides of each biscuit. I give him the wet biscuits and he cracks them open and sniffs them. Then he puts them in his pocket. "What do you want?" he says. "Now that you've failed to poison me to death.

There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not.

No zek had the right to stay one second in his workroom without the supervision of a free employee because prudence dictated that the prisoner would be bound to use that unsupervised second to break into the steel safe with a lead pencil, photograph its secret documents with a trouser button, explode an atom bomb, and fly to the moon.

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

I have never seen battles quite as terrifyingly beautiful as the ones I fight when my mind splinters and races, to swallow me into my own madness, again.

Complacency kills. Paranoia is the reason I’m still alive.

Often people that tell others they are "extremely polite" when the situation calls for tact and bluntness are not actually polite people. Instead, they hide behind the word “polite” because they have low self esteem or hidden agendas. Sadly, they impolitely confuse the hell out of everyone, send mixed signals, which then makes people question their sanity and motives.