Paranoid Man Quotes

I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.

In my paranoid world every storekeeper thinks I’m stealing, every man thinks I’m a prostitute or a lesbian, every woman thinks I’m a lesbian or arrogant, and every child and animal sees the real me and it is evil.

I grinned at him. 'Jealous?' He grinned right back. 'That's a trick question. If I say yes you'll accuse me of being paranoid and unreasonable, and if I say no you'll make some defensive crack about how I don't think you're worth getting jealous over.' This is what I got for hooking up with a lawyer.

I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me feel uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.

True love is jealousy in disguise: A man cannot restrict his lover from going to the club because he hates her, he actually hates the men who would come around and touch her.

Captain, the problem is not that I’m paranoid. The problem is that the universe keeps justifying my paranoia.

I once met a man who was paranoid about dying, so i shot him

One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.

In 2016, white conservatives elected as president a serial liar who is likely the most fearful and paranoid and wildly insecure white man who has ever run for office. And those white folks elected him because they believe they are victims. Yes, I am a Spokane Indian-an indigenous American-who grew up with white folks who think this country is being stolen from them. Hahahahahaahahahahaahahahaahahaha.

What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment, and the boys his ace in the hole? What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile and these boys his agents, his big surprise! His own revenge?

I know how silly and paranoid that sounds, especially coming from a man who gets a perverse thrill from taking chances. But it is a common condition of being poor white trash: you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

When a man’s face contorts in bitterness and hatred, he looks a little insane. When his mood changes from elated to assaultive in the time it takes to turn around, his mental stability seems open to question. When he accuses his partner of plotting to harm him, he seems paranoid. It is no wonder that the partner of an abusive man would come to suspect that he was mentally ill. Yet the great majority of my clients over the years have been psychologically “normal.” Their minds work logically; they understand cause and effect; they don’t hallucinate. Their perceptions of most life circumstances are reasonably accurate. They get good reports at work; they do well in school or training programs; and no one other than their partners—and children—thinks that there is anything wrong with them. Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.

Zoey didn’t want to be paranoid, but there was something about the man in the loincloth made of charred doll heads that made her nervous.

A paranoid man is a man with all the facts.

Pulling her eyes away, she figured it was best to keep such questions to herself. “You could have just, you know, asked me out instead,” she offered, though she wasn’t sure why. John let out a soft chuckle. “Very true. I guess I just…I wanted to keep you safe.” “Safe? From what?” Evangeline suddenly felt heat rush her face. Was this man just paranoid or what? “Safe from this? Or from you?” He looked up, placing his fork down on the plate. His stare was expressionless and she suddenly regretted her brazen accusation. “Both.” His reply had been simple, direct, stern. “Those people who did this to me, they’ll do worse to you if they think that we’re involved…if they think that their message wasn’t clear enough.

I imagine this conversation after a stranger is told No by a woman he has approached: MAN: What a bitch. What’s your problem, lady? I was just trying to offer a little help to a pretty woman. What are you so paranoid about? WOMAN: You’re right. I shouldn’t be wary. I’m overreacting about nothing. I mean, just because a man makes an unsolicited and persistent approach in an underground parking lot in a society where crimes against women have risen four times faster than the general crime rate, and three out of four women will suffer a violent crime; and just because I’ve personally heard horror stories from every female friend I’ve ever had; and just because I have to consider where I park, where I walk, whom I talk to, and whom I date in the context of whether someone will kill me or rape me or scare me half to death; and just because several times a week someone makes an inappropriate remark, stares at me, harasses me, follows me, or drives alongside my car pacing me; and just because I have to deal with the apartment manager who gives me the creeps for reasons I haven’t figured out, yet I can tell by the way he looks at me that given an opportunity he’d do something that would get us both on the evening news; and just because these are life-and-death issues most men know nothing about so that I’m made to feel foolish for being cautious even though I live at the center of a swirl of possible hazards DOESN’T MEAN A WOMAN SHOULD BE WARY OF A STRANGER WHO IGNORES THE WORD ‘NO’.

So is he cute? Good-looking, I mean? Because I can’t really tell with guys, and it looked like you two might have hit it off.” I grinned at him. “Jealous?” He grinned right back. “That’s a trick question. If I say yes you’ll accuse me of being paranoid and unreasonable, and if I say no you’ll make some defensive crack about how I don’t think you’re worth getting jealous over.” This was what I got for hooking up with a lawyer.

I knew that kind of thinking was paranoid, but after the wacky crap that had happened to me over the last couple of months, these days I’d be suspicious of a jolly white-bearded man in a red suit carrying a bag over his shoulder.(Violet Parker)

A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what’s going on.

What would you think of a man who not only kept an arsenal in his home, but was collecting at enormous financial sacrifice a second arsenal to protect the first one? What would you say if this man so frightened his neighbors that they in turn were collecting weapons to protect themselves from him? What if this man spent ten times as much money on his expensive weapons as he did on the education of his children? What if one of his children criticized his hobby and he called that child a traitor and a bum and disowned it? And he took another child who had obeyed him faithfully and armed that child and sent it out into the world to attack neighbors? What would you say about a man who introduces poisons into the water he drinks and the air he breathes? What if this man not only is feuding with the people on his block but involves himself in the quarrels of others in distant parts of the city and even in the suburbs? Such a man would clearly be a paranoid schizophrenic, Mr. Flanagan, with homicidal tendencies.

Oh my God, he thought suddenly. I’ve got a hard-on. “You want some or what?” Bailey asked softly. Reece took the water and drank down a sizeable amount. He grew paranoid that she could see his hard-on, but that would be impossible. The lights were dim. There was an armrest between them. Relax, bro. You’re cool. She can’t see your . . . oh, wait a minute. There it goes. It’s going down. Phew! Thank God. How embarrassing would that have been, right? For her to see how much she turns me on? How much I can’t stop thinking about the kind of panties she wears under those cigarette pants. The way her tits look in her button-up tops. Man, I love how she buttons them all the way up . . . wait a minute. Hold up. I mean down! Go down! Stupid dick!

But what were you supposed to do with that weight? Once it was on you? Just be a man? Just suck it up? Maybe you were. Maybe that was the real test. Maybe that is exactly the thing that made you a man: the ability to function with the worst possible secrets in your brain. Which was why so many grown-up men seemed so ridiculous. They never felt that responsibility. They were untested, unproven; they were boys in grown-up clothes.

Nationalism, originally a progressive movement, replaced the bonds of feudalism and absolutism. The average man today obtains his sense of identity from his belonging to a nation, rather than from his being a "Son of Man." His objectivity, that is, his reason, is warped by this fixation. He judges the "stranger" with different criteria than the members of his own clan. His feelings toward the stranger are equally warped. Those who are not "familiar" by bonds of blood and soil (expressed a common language, customs, food, song, etc.) are looked upon with suspicion, and paranoid delusions about them can spring up at the slightest provocation. This incestuous fixation not only poisons the relationship of the individual to the stranger, but to the members of his own clan and to himself. The person who has not freed himself from the ties to blood and soil is not yet fully born as a human being; his capacity for love and reason are crippled; he does not experience himself nor his fellow man in their-and his own-human reality.

The most frightening thing he said to me was this: “Don, you’d be surprised at how easy it is to convince the American people that a perfectly good man is a demon.” I’ll add this to the mix too: I believe God is a fan of people connecting and I think the enemy of God is a fan of people breaking off into paranoid tribes. And I think all the clanging pots and pans in the kitchen to scare people from the territory we feel compelled to defend is playing into the hands of dark forces. I think a lot of the shame-based religious and political methodology has more to do with keeping people contained than with setting them free. And I’m no fan of it.

For one hit he’d done a version of Victor/Victoria, pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man when he’d been hired to kill a paranoid and heavily guarded government official.

There is some sickness in man, some paranoid delusion, some grandiose morbidity that runs right through to distant ancestors. Or maybe it is the fear in lonely hearts that they might die without company.

Paranoid Android Please could you stop the noise, I’m trying to get some rest From all the unborn chicken voices in my head What’s that…? (I may be paranoid, but not an android) What’s that…? (I may be paranoid, but not an android) When I am king, you will be first against the wall With your opinion which is of no consequence at all What’s that…? (I may be paranoid, but no android) What’s that…? (I may be paranoid, but no android) Ambition makes you look pretty ugly Kicking and squealing gucci little piggy You don’t remember You don’t remember Why don’t you remember my name? Off with his head, man Off with his head, man Why don’t you remember my name? I guess he does…. Rain down, rain down Come on rain down on me From a great height From a great height… height… Rain down, rain down Come on rain down on me From a great height From a great height… height… Rain down, rain down Come on rain down on me That’s it, sir You’re leaving The crackle of pigskin The dust and the screaming The yuppies networking The panic, the vomit The panic, the vomit God loves his children, God loves his children, yeah!

I have to convince a paranoid man prone to spree-killing and snap judgements that someone isn’t a threat.” “He’s right to be paranoid. This is a city of fools, incompetents, and madmen. I haven’t felt this young in centuries.

You have such an odd relationship to your environment," mused the man. "Such a paranoid relationship. You seem intent on existing in smaller and smaller spaces, filled with more and more gadgets, with the mistaken impression that this will give you more control over your lives. There's something a little impious about it." "Nothing wrong with gadgets," muttered Alif. "No, except that they're not magic," said the man, "and a lot of you seem to believe they should be.

It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of. She knew, because she had held him, that he suffered DT’s. Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind’s plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. Oedipa did not know where she was. Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years, to hear again the earnest, high voice of her second or third collegiate love Ray Glozing bitching among “uhs” and the syncopated tonguing of a cavity, about his freshman calculus; “dt,” God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick. She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT’s must give access to dt’s of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright. But nothing she knew of would preserve them, or him.

And so we have…this critical problem as human beings of seeing to it that the mythology—the constellation of sign signals, affect images, energy-releasing and -directing signs—that we are communicating to our young will deliver directive messages qualified to relate them richly and vitally to the environment that is to be theirs for life, and not to some period of man already past, some piously desiderated future, or—what is worst of all—some querulous, freakish sect or momentary fad. And I call this problem critical because, when it is badly resolved, the result for the miseducated individual is what is known, in mythological terms, as a Waste Land situation. The world does not talk to him; he does not talk to the world. When that is the case, there is a cut-off, the individual is thrown back on himself, and he is in prime shape for that psychotic break-away that will turn him into either an essential schizophrenic in a padded cell, or a paranoid screaming slogans at large, in a bughouse without walls.

Hofstadter shows how the political psychology of paranoid politics works: (1) posit, as Senator Joseph McCarthy did, “a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man”; (2) declare its infiltration of the government to be massive and pernicious; and (3) insist that time is running out, and without immediate action their takeover will be complete. Paranoid politics is thus a psychological disposition—projecting one’s problem onto the fiendish machinations of others, so as both to uphold one’s own purity and goodness and simultaneously to identify the source of the problem. As with many projects that rely on psychological displacement, the groups often produce the very thing they most fear; they become the enemy they are seeking to destroy:

It was not as if he did not know what living in Lagos could do to a woman married to a young and wealthy man, how easy it was to slip into paranoid about 'Lagos girls,' those sophisticated monsters of glamour who swallowed husbands whole, slithering them down their throats.

In short, conquest is in no sense a necessary sign of higher human development, though conquistadors have always thought otherwise. Any valid concept of organic development must use the primary terms of ecology-cooperation and symbiosis-as well as struggle and conflict, for even predators are part of a food chain, and do not 'conquer' their prey except to eat them. The idea of total conquest is an extrapolation from the existing power system: it indicates, not a desirable end, accomodation, but a pathological aberration, re-enforced by such rewards as this system bestows. As for the climactic notion that "the universe will be man's at last"-what is this but a paranoid fantasy, comparable to the claims of an asylum inmate who imagines that he is Emperor of the World? Such a claim is countless light-years away from reality.

Here then is a scientific answer to the question, “What went wrong?”. Man is the victim of an evolutionary error, an error in brain building. Nature or the Mind Force was in too much of a hurry. It created our truly magnificent neocortex without setting up a clear chain of command to ensure that the new brain, seat of the reason, would dominate the old brains, seats of the instincts and emotions. The result was a highly suggestible, unstable naked ape that lived largely in the world of fantasy, was full of paranoid delusions and chronically liable to panic.

Today, modern man has developed in a different direction. We are now far more polarised in our brains than our bodies and most people make decisions through reason rather than intuition. This development has changed the 57th Shadow of Unease. Unease no longer functions as an early warning system restricting fear only to the moment when it is needed for survival. Now unease is translated by our minds. It is continuous and manifests as anxiety. Furthermore, because of this, it is enhanced through the universal morphogenetic field that connects all human beings as one. The mind has become stronger than instinct, and seeks to end unease through the creation of external security. And so the rat race of modern culture is born. The more mind-centred humanity becomes the more security it tries to create for itself and in turn the more paranoid it becomes. Security and protection have become a global obsession, even though they are a complete illusion.

How do you...? What is it you're doing?" he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutitive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense. Vardy even smiled. "Paranoid," he said. "Theology.

Call me paranoid, but there’s nothing like a murder attempt in broad daylight to make a man cautious.

Not to brag, big man, but just because an answer is truthful doesn’t mean it’s useful. They don’t think I’m more than an empty-headed office drone.

Some of the more industrious ones were washing the windshields of cars that had been trapped by the red light. I used to see them from inside cars and think they brought it on themselves, and they probably did but now it didn't make a difference. I went over to the fire and warmed my hands with the group. I looked at their faces: idiots, criminals, retards, schizophrenics, paranoids, rejects, fuck-ups, broken-down failures. Alone, once children, never asked to be put on this earth, they ended up as jurors. Their lives were the verdict: the system, the man, something had failed.

Save for the fit of bizarre laughter at the end, the man seems so calm, sensible, rational. Duffy wishes he met more like him. A bit paranoid about this terrorism business, but frankly, he might be right. You never know who is around the bend to blow you up, destroy your symbols, set your embassy on fire, shit on your toilet seat, or send anthrax swimming into the subway air and into everyone's lungs.

A cop ascending a staircase in a white neighborhood who was so pre-terrified of the residents that he pulled the trigger at the first sound he heard would be derided as a paranoid lunatic. Similarly, the idea that a fat white guy selling hot smokes on a street corner was a grave threat would be laughed at as absurd. But a 350-pound black man is plausibly described in the press as someone who scared pedestrians, a threat needing to be defused. Try to imagine a world where there isn’t a vast unspoken consensus that black men are inherently scary, and most of these police assaults would play in the media like spontaneous attacks of madness. Instead, they’re sold as battle scenes from an occupation story, where a quick trigger finger while patrolling the planet of a violent alien race is easy to understand.

What’s your dad doing for his bachelor party?” I laugh. “Have you met my dad? He’s the last person who would ever have a bachelor party. He doesn’t even have any guy friends to have a party with!” I stop and consider this. “Well, I guess Josh is the closest thing he has. We haven’t seen much of him since he went to school, but he and my dad still e-mail every so often.” “I don’t get what your family sees in that guy,” Peter says sourly. “What’s so great about him?” It’s a touchy subject. Peter’s paranoid my dad likes Josh better than him, and I try to tell him it’s not a contest--which it definitely isn’t. Daddy’s known Josh since he was a kid. They trade comic books, for Pete’s sake. So, no contest. Obviously my dad likes Josh better. But only because he knows him better. And only because they’re more alike: Neither of them is cool. And Peter’s definitely cool. My dad is bewildered by cool. “Josh loves my dad’s cooking.” “So do I!” “They have the same taste in movies.” Peter throws in, “And Josh was never in a hot tub video with one of his daughters.” “Oh my God, let it go already! My dad’s forgotten about that.” “Forgotten” might be too strong of a word. Maybe more like he’s never brought it up again and he hopefully never will. “I find that hard to believe.” “Well, believe it. My dad is a very forgiving, very forgetful man.

For the week after the man's visit to my work, campus security will assign an officer to stand outside the door of my classroom while I teach, in case he returns. On one of these days, I teach Alice Notley's grouchy epic poem Disobedience. A student complaints, Notley says she wants a dailiness that is free and beautiful, but she's fixated on all the things she hates and fears the most, and then smashes her face and ours in them for four hundred pages. Why bother? Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren't we talking more about that? Materials never leave this world. They just keep recycling, recombining. That's what you kept telling me when we first met—that in a real, material sense, what is made from where. I didn't have a clue what you were talking about, but I could see you burned for it. I wanted to be near that burning. I still don't understand, but at least now my fingers ride the lip. Notley knows all this; it's what tears her up. It's why she's a mystic, why she locks herself in a dark closet, why she knocks herself out to have visions. Can she help it if the unconscious is a sewer? At least my student had unwittingly backed us into a crucial paradox, which helps to explain the work of any number of artists: it is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices.

With a start that I realized the paranoid fantasies I’d been hearing the men around me tell my entire life had found purchase in the zeitgeist. Just as we’d all stood around a truck full of guns years earlier, here we were, out in public, discussing international conspiracies meant to inspire racial and societal unrest. Black people were in on it. Immigrants were in on it. Academics like myself were in on it. Even white women were in on it. Everyone, that is, except white men who would either have to stop the plot before it was realized or else die in a blaze of fire defending their homes and families.

What happened? Many things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile—and perfection, fleeting. The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular. Auto industry executives, to say the least, were not paranoid. Instead of listening to a customer base that wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger. Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted (both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’ new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of moving quickly to keep up with the changing market, executives willingly embraced “death by committee.” Ross Perot once quipped that if a man saw a snake on the factory floor at GM, they’d form a committee to analyze whether they should kill it. Easy success had transformed the American auto

But none of them compared to the dangerous stranger in her room. While the men she was used to were hotter than hell, what they lacked was the fierce aura of power that emanated from this man and his stern, steely features. It was as if he were the deadliest of predators. Feral. That was the only word to do him justice. Surely there wasn’t another soldier in the entire universe who could match him in terms of raw beauty or lethal demeanor. His blond hair was snow white and his features sharp and icy. He wore a pair of black shades that annoyed her since she couldn’t see the upper part of his face or the color of his eyes. Not that it mattered. She saw enough to know that in the land of gorgeous men, he had no competition. As a stark contrast to his white hair, his clothes were a black so deep they seemed to absorb all light, and they were trimmed in silver … No, not silver. Those were weapons tucked into the sleeves and lapels of his ankle-length coat. The left side of it was pulled back, exposing a holstered blaster that was strapped to his left hip. The tall flight boots had silver buckles going up the sides that were fashioned into the image of skulls. At least that’s what she saw at first glance, but as he moved closer she realized those could come off and double as weapons, too. Wow, he was either extremely paranoid or more lethal than a team of League assassins. And that said something.

We walked down a narrow alley that opened up to one of the main thoroughfares of Voa. My body clenched, for a moment, as a man’s eyes lingered on my face. And a woman’s. And a child’s. Everywhere eyes caught mine and then shifted away. I grabbed Akos’s arm, and pulled him in to whisper, “They’re staring. They know who I am.” “No,” he said. “They’re staring because you’ve got bright blue paint all over your face.” I touched my cheek, lightly, where the paint had dried. My skin felt rough and scaly. It hadn’t occurred to me that today it meant nothing if people stared at me. “You’re kind of paranoid, you know that?” he said to me. “And you’re starting to sound kind of cocky, for someone I routinely beat up.” He laughed.

Hi!” Zé jumped a little, surprised by the female voice beside him. “I’m Mandy.” She held out her hand. “And you’re Zezé Vargas.” He looked at her but didn’t say anything. “I see.” She lowered her hand. “A little paranoid, are we? Understandable, I guess, considering your line of work.” “Do I know you?” “No. That’s why I introduced myself. Remember? I’m Mandy.” “Why are you talking to me?” She smiled. “I have an offer for you.” “You have an offer for a man you don’t know? So you’re a prostitute?” That smile disappeared and those eyes went from brown to a bright and dangerous blue. “Do I look like a prostitute to you?” “Well—” Zé blew out a long sigh. “I don’t know how to answer that without getting punched in the face, soooo .

One experience that led Jung to this conclusion took place in 1906 and involved the hallucination of a young man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One day while making his rounds Jung found the young man standing at a window and staring up at the sun. The man was also moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. When Jung asked him what he was doing he explained that he was looking at the sun's penis, and when he moved his head from side to side, the sun's penis moved and caused the wind to blow. At the time Jung viewed the man's assertion as the product of a hallucination. But several years later he came across a translation of a two-thousand-year-old Persian religious text that changed his mind. The text consisted of a series of rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions. It described one of the visions and said that if the participant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man had had contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man's vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself. Jung called such images archetypes and believed they were so ancient it's as if each of us has the memory of a two-million-year-old man lurking somewhere in the depths of our unconscious minds.

It’s all supposed to be so innocent, upwardly mobile snob, designer shades, beret, so desperate to show he’s got good taste, except he’s also dyslexic so he gets ‘good taste’ mixed up with ‘taste good,’ but it’s worse than that! Far, far worse! Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won’t be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Suprmarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it. . . .” “Saunch, wow, that’s. . .” “It’s been on my mind. And another thing. Why is there Chicken of the Sea, but no Tuna of the Farm?” “Um. . .” Doc actually beginning to think about this. “And don’t forget,” Sauncho went on to remind him darkly, “that Charles Manson and the Vietcong are also named Charlie.

Given the benefit of hindsight, it’s difficult to understand why anyone doubts the fascist nature of the French Revolution. Few dispute that it was totalitarian, terrorist, nationalist, conspiratorial, and populist. It produced the first modern dictators, Robespierre and Napoleon, and worked on the premise that the nation had to be ruled by an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the “general will.” The paranoid Jacobin mentality made the revolutionaries more savage and cruel than the king they replaced. Some fifty thousand people ultimately died in the Terror, many in political show trials that Simon Schama describes as the “founding charter of totalitarian justice.” Robespierre summed up the totalitarian logic of the Revolution: “There are only two parties in France: the people and its enemies. We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man…[W]e must exterminate all our enemies.

The faggots and their friends now live in Ramrod. The leader of Ramrod is Warren-And-His-Fuckpole. He is the leader of Ramrod because he is the most paranoid and therefore the most vicious man in the land. Warren wants to know who the leader of the faggots is so he can rationalize with him. But the faggots have no leader. They have only dead heroes. Ramrod is known to its neighbors for the fierceness of its weapons and the touchiness of its leaders. To support their violence, the rich men without color who own Ramrod send their tax collectors out to steal the people's work; they send their shifty-eyed ones out to sell the people machines which do not work and security which is not dependable; they send their thugs and goons out to take peacefulness away from the people. The more the rich men without color can steal from or take or sell to the people, the more violence they can buy. Ramrod is known to its neighbors for the elaborateness of its violence and its eagerness to use it.

No, that’s not the style of these people,’ explained Maxy. ‘You shouldn’t think of these Bolsheviks as modern politicians. They were religious fanatics. Their Marxism was fanatical; their fervour was semi-Islamic; and they saw themselves as members of a secret military-religious order like the medieval Crusaders or the Knights Templar. They were ruthless, amoral and paranoid. They believed that millions would have to die to create their perfect world. Family, love and friendship were nothing compared to the holy grail. People died of gossip at Stalin’s court. For a man like Satinov, secrecy was everything.

Not your ordinary guy, Nikolai Gogol," Mr. Lawson says. "He is celebrated today as one of Russia's most brilliant writers. But during his life he was understood by no one, least of all himself. One might say he typified the phrase 'eccentric genius.' Gogol's life, in a nutshell, was a steady decline into madness. The writer Ivan Turgenev described him as an intelligent, queer, and sickly creature. He was reputed to be a hypochondriac and a deeply paranoid, frustrated man. He was, in addition, by all accounts, morbidly melancholic, given to fits of severe depression. He had trouble making friends. He never married, fathered no children. It's commonly believed he died a virgin.

The fifth was a blond man wearing a navy peacoat and standing with his hands in his pockets. He did not smile or point or make faces. He was staring at Laura. After a few minutes during which the stranger’s gaze did not shift from the child, Bob became concerned. The guy was good looking and clean-cut but there was a hardness in his face, too, and some quality that could not be put into words but that made Bob think this was a man who had seen and done terrible things. He began to remember sensational tabloid stories of kidnappers, babies being sold on the black market. He told himself that he was paranoid, imagining a danger where none existed because, having lost Janet, he was now worried about losing his daughter as well. But the longer the blond man studied Laura, the more uneasy Bob became. As if sensing that uneasiness, the man looked up. They stared at each other. The stranger’s blue eyes were unusually bright, intense. Bob’s fear deepened. He held his daughter closer, as if the stranger might smash through the nursery window to seize her. He considered calling one of the crèche nurses and suggesting that she speak to the man, make inquiries about him. Then the stranger smiled. His was a broad, warm, genuine smile that transformed his face. In an instant he no longer looked sinister but friendly. He winked at Bob and mouthed one word through the thick glass: ‘Beautiful.’ Bob

I pull the fire escape door open, scoop my eyeshadow palette off the ground and slip back inside. For a moment, I pause in the corridor and catch my breath. Adrenaline is surging through me. Rage. A normal woman would call the police at this point. But a normal woman would never have been paranoid enough in the first place to pretend to go to the toilet, only to sneak out of the fire escape and spy through a window to watch what her date does when he has five minutes alone with her drink. Nope. A normal woman would have gone to the loo, done a pee and topped up her lipstick. Or she’d have texted a friend about her hot date, feeling giddy with hope and excitement. Now, let’s think about what would have happened to a normal woman. A normal woman would have headed back to her date, smiling prettily, before sitting down and drinking her drugged drink. Then, a short while later, that normal woman would have started feeling far more drunk than she normally does after just a couple of drinks, but she’d probably blame herself. She’d wonder if maybe she’d drunk too much. Or maybe she’d blame herself for having not eaten earlier in the day because she didn’t want to look fat in her dress. Or maybe she’d blame herself because that’s just what she does; she blames herself. And then, just as she started to feel woozy and a bit confused, her date would take her outside for some fresh air and she’d be grateful to him. She’d think he was caring and responsible, when really, he was just whisking her out of sight, before she started to look less like she was drunk and more like she’d been drugged. And then the next thing she’d know, she’d be staggering into the back of a cab and her date would be asking her to tell the driver where she lived. And when she’d barely be able to get the words out and her date made a joke to the driver about how drunk she was, she’d feel small and embarrassed. And then she’d find herself slumping into her date’s open arms, flopping against his big manly body, and she’d feel grateful once more that this man was taking care of her and getting her home safe. And then, once the taxi slowed down and she blinked her eyes open and found they’d pulled up outside her flat, she’d notice in a fleeting moment of clarity that when the driver asked for the fare, her date thrust two crisp ten-pound notes towards him in a weirdly premeditated move, as though he’d known this moment was going to happen all along. As though he’d had the cash lined up, the plan set, and she’d feel something. Something. But then she’d be staggering out of the taxi, even sloppier than when she got in, and her legs would be buckling, and she’d cling to her date for support, her make-up now smudged, her eyes half-closed, her hair messy. She’d look a state and he’d ask her which flat was hers, and she’d walk with him to her front door, to the flat where she lives alone. To the place that’s full of books and cute knick-knacks from charity shops and colourful but inexpensive clothes. She’d unlock her front door, her hand sliding drunkenly over the lock, and she’d lead him into the place she’s been using as a base to try to get ahead in life, and then he’d look around, keen-eyed, until he spotted her bedroom and he’d draw her in. And then all of a sudden he’d be in her bedroom and she wouldn’t be able to remember if she’d asked him back or not or quite how this happened, and it would all be moving so fast and her thoughts would be unable to keep up – they’d keep sliding away – and he’d be kissing her and she’d be unsure what was happening as he pulled off her dress and she’d wonder, did she ask for this? Does she want this? Has she been a ‘slut’ again? But the thoughts would be weak, they’d keep falling away and he’d be confident and he’d be certain and he’d be good-looking and he’d be pulling off her bra and taking off her knickers. He’d be pushing himself inside her. The next day, he’d be gone by the time she woke up. She’d be blocked, unmatched...

An important and relevant question that the public has been asking is this: Is the man simply crazy, or is he crazy like a fox? Is he mentally compromised or simply vile? When he lies, does he know he is lying, or does he believe his own lies? When he makes wild accusations, is he truly paranoid, or is he consciously and cunningly trying to deflect attention from his misdeeds?

I typed the winery address into the GPS and then proceeded to pull out of the rental company driveway. I screeched and slammed on the brakes every four feet until I got out onto the street. There was going to be a learning curve. The GPS lady successfully got me over the Golden Gate, but I didn’t get to enjoy one minute of it. Paranoid that I was going to hit a pedestrian or a cyclist or launch myself off the massive bridge, I couldn’t take my eyes off of the car in front of me. Once I was out of the city, I spotted a Wendy’s and pulled off the highway. GPS lady started getting frantic. “Recalculating. Head North on DuPont for 1.3 miles.” I did a quick U-turn to get to the other side of the freeway and into the loving arms of a chocolate frosty. “Recalculating.” Shit. Shut up, lady. I was frantically hitting buttons until I was able to finally silence her. I made a right turn and then another turn immediately into the Wendy’s parking lot and into the drive-thru line. I glanced at the clock. It was three forty. I still had time. I pulled up to the speaker and shouted, “I’ll take a regular French fry and a large chocolate frosty.” Just then, I heard a very loud, abbreviated siren sound. Whoop. I looked into my rearview mirror and spotted the source. It was a police officer on a motorcycle. What’s he doing? I sat there waiting for the Wendy’s speaker to confirm my order, and then again, Whoop. “Ma’am, please pull out of the drive-thru and off to the side.” What’s going on? I quickly rolled the window all the way down, stuck my head out, and peered around until the policeman was in my view. “Are you talking to me?” To my absolute horror, he used the speaker again. “Yes, ma’am, I am talking to you. Please pull out of the drive-thru.” Holy shit, I’m being pulled over in a Wendy’s drive-thru. “Excuse me, Wendy’s people? You need to scratch that last order.” A few seconds went by and then a young man’s voice came over the speaker. “Yeah, we figured that,” he said before bursting into laughter and cutting the speaker off. The policeman was very friendly and seemed to find a little humor in the situation as well. Apparently I had made an illegal right turn at a red light just before I pulled into the parking lot. After completely and utterly humiliating me, he let me off with a warning, which was nice, but I still didn’t have a frosty. Pulling my old Chicago Cubs cap from my bag, I decided that nothing was going to get in the way of my beloved frosty. Going incognito, I made my way through the door. Apparently the cap was not enough because the Justin Timberlake–looking fellow behind the counter could not contain himself. “Hi,” I said. “Hi, what can I get you?” he said, and then he clapped his hand over his mouth, struggling to hold back a huge amount of laughter and making gagging noises in the back of his throat in the process. “Can I get an extra-large chocolate frosty please, and make it snappy.” “Do you still want the fries with that?” There was more laughter and then I heard laughter from the back as well. “No, thank you.” I paid, grabbed my cup, and hightailed it out of there.

He bumped the door open with his hip and spun through, sweeping the rifle's barrel across what did indeed prove to be a small but well-appointed kitchen. He debated opening the drawers to ensure they weren't some sort of façade concealing a hiding place but decided against it; it was clearly just a d*** kitchen, and he didn't have Kelsier pegged as the sort of man who was paranoid enough to build a bolt-hole into a kitchen located in a secret network of tunnels in the middle of a lonely asteroid. You had to draw the line somewhere.

He did have some small advantage, though. He knew the truth about surveillance. Ever since the dawn of GWOT the nations of the West – apart from the United States, where civil libertarians tended to carry rifles and use them on closed-circuit cameras as an expression of their freedoms – had put their faith in creating a paranoid state, one where every move of every citizen was recorded and logged and filmed and fuck you, if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to worry about. Whether this had had any great influence in the course of GWOT was a moot point, but there was one thing not generally appreciated about the paranoid state. It was incredibly labour-intensive. There were simply not enough people to monitor all the cameras. Every shop had one, every bus and train and theatre and public convenience, every street and road and alleyway. Computers with facial recognition and gait recognition and body language recognition could do some of the job, but they were relatively simple to fool, expensive, and times had been hard for decades. It was cheaper to get people to watch the screens. But no nation on Earth had a security service large enough, a police force big enough, to keep an eye on all those live feeds. So it was contracted out. To private security firms all trying to undercut each other. The big stores had their own security men, but they were only interested in people going in and out of the store, not someone just passing by. So instead of a single all-seeing eye London’s seemingly-impregnable surveillance map was actually a patchwork of little territories and jurisdictions, and while they all had, by law, to make their footage available to the forces of law and order, many of the control rooms were actually manned by bored, underpaid, undertrained and badly-motivated immigrants.

These dynamics are, Sedgwick argues, at the center of the "paranoid Gothic"; narratives like Frankenstein or Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in which "one man's mind could be read by that of the feared and desired other."(Sedgwick 186-187)

The black man lifted the large cup and drank deeply through the straw. Then he winked. A cold, acid wave of paranoid delusion crashed down, washing the carcass of Daniel's confidence onto some bone-colored beach for the vultures to pick.

are you paranoid?” he asks. “of course. what sane man is not?

When someone ignores that word, ask yourself: Why is this person seeking to control me? What does he want? It is best to get away from the person altogether, but if that’s not practical, the response that serves safety is to dramatically raise your insistence, skipping several levels of politeness. “I said NO!” When I encounter people hung up on the seeming rudeness of this response (and there are many), I imagine this conversation after a stranger is told No by a woman he has approached: MAN: What a bitch. What’s your problem, lady? I was just trying to offer a little help to a pretty woman. What are you so paranoid about? WOMAN: You’re right. I shouldn’t be wary. I’m overreacting about nothing. I mean, just because a man makes an unsolicited and persistent approach in an underground parking lot in a society where crimes against women have risen four times faster than the general crime rate, and three out of four women will suffer a violent crime; and just because I’ve personally heard horror stories from every female friend I’ve ever had; and just because I have to consider where I park, where I walk, whom I talk to, and whom I date in the context of whether someone will kill me or rape me or scare me half to death; and just because several times a week someone makes an inappropriate remark, stares at me, harasses me, follows me, or drives alongside my car pacing me; and just because I have to deal with the apartment manager who gives me the creeps for reasons I haven’t figured out, yet I can tell by the way he looks at me that given an opportunity he’d do something that would get us both on the evening news; and just because these are life-and-death issues most men know nothing about so that I’m made to feel foolish for being cautious even though I live at the center of a swirl of possible hazards DOESN’T MEAN A WOMAN SHOULD BE WARY OF A STRANGER WHO IGNORES THE WORD ‘NO’.

Heads of companies often inadvertently contribute to this confusion. Some time ago a business reporter told me of an encounter with the head of a major Japanese corporation. The reporter was working on a profile of the company. When he asked questions that tried to clarify the strategy of the corporation, the other man angrily retorted, “Why would I tell you our strategy? So I could help our competitors?” I think this man wouldn’t talk about his strategy not because he was afraid of helping his competitors but because he didn’t have one: this company’s public statements have always struck me as extraordinarily ambiguous.

Man needs dreams, as recent sleep research has well-documented. If you wake people up each time they start to dream (which is revealed by their rapid eye movements, which has led scientists to speak of REM sleep, meaning sleep with rapid eye movements and dreams), they will, within a few nights, become neurotic, irritable and slightly paranoid. No reputable researcher has continued this experiment for more than a few nights, because the evidence indicates real risk that the subjects might actually go totally mad. It doesn’t matter how much sleep they have had; if they aren’t able to dream, the same neurotic and near-psychotic behavior will appear.

Rousseau’s philosophy can be summed up in four words: nature good, society bad. He believed in the “natural goodness of man.” In his Discourse on Inequality, he paints a picture of man in his natural state, “wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without domicile, without want and without liaisons, with no need of his fellow-men, likewise with no desire to harm them.” Nobody is born mean-spirited, petty, vindictive, paranoid. Society makes them that way. Rousseau’s “savage man” lives in each moment with no regrets about the past or worries about the future.

And that’s another reason I detest Mogshack, by the way. I never knew him to try and wean a patient away from dependence on guns. Yet he has two, three thousand a year of the population of New York State through his hands. By this time, if he’d done his job properly, he’d have created a glut of second-hand weaponry and cooled the temperature in this city past the flashpoint.” “Two or three thousand out of how many many million?” Flamen snapped. “Out of how many who are unstable enough to lose their marbles and start shooting at random into the street?” Conroy countered. “You don’t start riots, I don’t start riots, the politically educated leaders of the X Patriots don’t start riots. Paranoids start riots and other people are tipped over the edge by contagious hysteria. Your typical insurrectionary sniper isn’t a revolutionary or a fanatic—he’s someone who’s so devoid of empathy he can treat the human beings below his window as moving targets conveniently offered for his skill. And by clever exploitation of the public’s insecurity the Gottschalks have managed to put over a gang of lies equating gunmanship with masculine potency, which do even more damage than Mogshack’s pernicious dogmas. Damn it, man: anyone who can treat another human being as an object for target practice is stuck even further back in the infantile stage than somebody who’s frightened to move on from the masturbation phase and go to bed with a girl! Do you own a gun?

How long did it last?” “Two years,” Max replied, bitterly. “There have been wars much, much longer. But none of them had even been half as bloody.” “And the Queen—” “She was just a small child then. The war was nearly coming to an end, or so we thought. And then, the King was killed by his best friend. The person he trusted above anyone else. And that sent everything to shit all over again. Apparently…” His voice flattened. “She was there when it happened.” No wonder she was paranoid. “But you won still?” “The Crown won, in the end, yes.” His correction was strained and firm. The Crown — not him. Those words echoed again: This is the man responsible for the end of the war. Responsible for our victory at Sarlazai.

oversuspicious, overaggressive” terms — that the last days are near. “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values,” Hofstadter wrote. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever running short.

can’t get my people inside. These crackpots are abidingly paranoid. If a man has even a tenth part nonhuman blood, he’s a breed and part of the problem. Never mind he might have been a war hero. The spiders spinning the web of hatred are sure humankind can be redeemed only through the extinction of the rest of the races. Even to the extreme of hunting down and expunging every drop of nonhuman blood. Otherwise us uniques might breed back to original stock.” I guess my mouth was open. Luckily no flies were working the cell. “That’s so damned ridiculous—” “What does ridiculous have to do with belief? Those people are out there, Garrett.” I wanted to argue but my last case had involved several religions, each more unlikely than the last.

that in the Nixon era the United States was, in essence, a ‘rogue state.’ It had a ruthless, paranoid, and unstable leader who did not hesitate to break the laws of his own country in order to violate the neutrality, menace the territorial integrity, or destabilize the internal affairs of other nations. At the close of this man’s reign, in an episode more typical of a banana republic or a ‘peoples’ democracy,’ his own secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, had to instruct the Joint Chiefs of Staff to disregard any military order originating in the White House.”266

The radical institutional change to war cannot, I submit, be sufficiently explained on either biological or rational economic grounds. Beneath it lies a more significant irrational component that has as yet hardly been explored. Civilized war begins not by the direct conversion of the hunting chief into the war-making king, but in an earlier passage from the animal-hunt to the man-hunt; and the special purpose of that hunt, if we may cautiously carry back indisputable later evidence into the remote past, was the capture of victims for human sacrifice. There is much scattered data, which I have already touched on in discussing domestication, to suggest that local human sacrifice antedated inter-tribal or inter-urban war. From the beginning, on this hypothesis, war was probably the by-product of a religious ritual whose vital importance to the community far transcended those mundane gains of territory or booty or slaves by which later communities sought to explain their paranoid obsessions and their grisly collective holocausts.

With a camera, a microphone, and sufficient cash, you, too, can craft your own version of the world and emblazon it with a premium of fear over facts. (Be warned though: Paranoid schizophrenia makes for compelling film, but it's no way of life.)

Because” is ambiguous. It could mean only a subjective motive (“Because I’m paranoid, I believe that man is going to kill me”), or it could mean an objective reason (“Because he’s pointing a gun at me and squeezing the trigger, I believe that man is going to kill me”). “We believe in angels because we seek security” is only a subjective, psychological motive. “We believe in angels because God has revealed to us in the Bible that they exist” is an objective reason

When it comes to generating writing material, teenagers are gold. Their world is a narcissistic, anarchic, paranoid hell of anxieties and stresses about how they look; how popular they are or aren’t; and how fast or slowly, big or small their private parts are growing. As an observer, it’s fantastic. Hilarious, at times. Poignant and heartbreaking. It is all the stuff of great human drama because, before your eyes, you get to witness character transformation. Boy grows into man. Girl grows into woman. Writers strain to make this shit up. But – and here’s the catch – we dare not discuss any of this if we want our kids to trust us or ever talk to us again. And that’s because, lifts and pocket money aside, teenagers crave privacy – the need for which hatches both swiftly and silently while we’re sorting out the laundry. It’s as if they suddenly wake up one day creeped out by the thought of all those years we wiped their butts and helped them put on their undies and they go into lock- down. They smoke us out, put up walls, close their doors, shut down their stories, and waft, earphoned, through our homes in a shroud of hormones and appetite. Their lives – in which, until recently, we participated with Too Much Information and gross oversharing – suddenly become ‘none of our business.

She came across as charming and efficient, but problems erupted as soon as she started. Two of my best people threatened to quit, so I took her off the project.” I could barely watch as she laughed and yakked like an intimate friend of both Ian’s and Baldacchio’s. On tonight of all nights, the opening of Abraham’s exhibition. I had to wonder, was she here because of me? Everyone in the business knew he’d been my teacher and mentor. Was I completely paranoid? I would’ve loved to pursue the topic of Minka’s shortcomings and find out how in the world she’d finagled a job at the Covington in the first place, but Abraham’s friend Doris interrupted us just then, grabbing Abraham’s arm and giving it a vigorous shake. “Now, what were you yelling about, old man?” she said. I almost snorted. “Doris Bondurant,” Abraham said formally, “I’d like to introduce my former assistant and now my greatest competition, Brooklyn Wainwright. Brooklyn, this is my old friend Doris Bondurant.” “Watch who you’re calling old, buster,” she said, and elbowed Abraham in

MAN: What a bitch. What’s your problem, lady? I was just trying to offer a little help to a pretty woman. What are you so paranoid about? WOMAN: You’re right. I shouldn’t be wary. I’m overreacting about nothing. I mean, just because a man makes an unsolicited and persistent approach in an underground parking lot in a society where crimes against women have risen four times faster than the general crime rate, and three out of four women will suffer a violent crime; and just because I’ve personally heard horror stories from every female friend I’ve ever had; and just because I have to consider where I park, where I walk, whom I talk to, and whom I date in the context of whether someone will kill me or rape me or scare me half to death; and just because several times a week someone makes an inappropriate remark, stares at me, harasses me, follows me, or drives alongside my car pacing me; and just because I have to deal with the apartment manager who gives me the creeps for reasons I haven’t figured out, yet I can tell by the way he looks at me that given an opportunity he’d do something that would get us both on the evening news; and just because these are life-and-death issues most men know nothing about so that I’m made to feel foolish for being cautious even though I live at the center of a swirl of possible hazards DOESN’T MEAN A WOMAN SHOULD BE WARY OF A STRANGER WHO IGNORES THE WORD ‘NO’.

have to admit, he’s building a very strong case. But I have to remember that I am talking to a man with paranoid schizophrenia.

I suspect since my last thought before falling asleep was about Mac’s comment that princes don’t sleep at all, I end up dreaming about her, which makes me paranoid Barrons might catch wind of it in the dreaming, and somehow black-magic his way into my subconscious and kill me—he’s a prickly, territorial bastard. If anyone can pull off such a stunt, it’s him. Mac is sexy in ways I can’t put into words. A fascinating darkness lurks beneath all that bubblegum pinkness she exudes that makes a man wonder just how flat-out ferocious and kinked she is in bed. Like I said, duality is my poison.

The town is attracting a whole load of yobs who just want to roam around picking fights and getting into trouble. I’m not surprised Russell’s dad was really worried about him being out late.’ ‘Russell can look after himself, Dad. He’s not some sad little wimp.’ ‘He could be Mr Muscles Macho Man. It wouldn’t make any difference if a whole gang started in on him.’ ‘You’re getting totally paranoid, Dad.’ ‘Maybe. I don’t know. But how about if you and Russell met up after school and then he went back home around nine?’ ‘Dad! We’re not Eggs’s age!’ ‘I know, I know – but you’re as precious to me as Eggs and I don’t need another night like Thursday. Look, you’re still supposed to be in the doghouse for that. I’ll let you see Russell, but I’m going to stick to this nine o’clock curfew for the time being. I think that’s more than fair.’ ‘I don’t!’ ‘Well it gets dark by nine – so you couldn’t do any sketching then, could you?’ says Dad, smiling. I smile back weakly. I don’t know who’s bluffing who. But at least I can see Russell – even if it’s only in daylight! I go up to my bedroom and read his letter again. Several times more. Then I go downstairs and ring Nadine and tell her that it’s all OK and that Russell walked round and round the town looking for me, practically knocking at every house door. Nadine isn’t quite as impressed as I’d hoped. She’s got her Claudie album playing full blast (her family are obviously out) and she’s singing along instead of concentrating fully. I need to ask her something. ‘Nadine, do you really think Russell looks seriously shifty?’ Nadine herself sounds as if she’s doing some serious shifting the other end of the phone. ‘No, no, Ellie, not at all. I was just, you know, saying stuff to comfort you. I don’t think his eyes are too close together either. I think it was just his intense expression when he was sketching you.

but this time around, she had tried to be more trusting. She’d told herself that being paranoid, skeptical, and insecure wasn’t good, and that maybe Tim really did love her as much as he said he did. She had also decided that he didn’t seem like the kind of man who would be unfaithful, not with his regularly talking

It is important to recognize that Blake was a troubled spirit, subject to deep psychic stresses, with what we would now call paranoid and schizoid tendencies that were sometimes overwhelming. During his life he was often accused of madness, but the artist Samuel Palmer, who knew him well, remembered him as ‘one of the sanest, if not the most thoroughly sane man I have ever known.’ And a Baptist minister replied, when asked if he thought Blake was cracked, ‘Yes, but his is a crack that lets in the light.

The Fearless Flyer began life in 1969 during the Good Time Charley phase of Trader Joe’s as the Insider’s Wine Report, a sheet of gossip of “inside” information on the wine industry at a time where there weren’t any such gossip sheets, for the excellent reason that few people were interested in wine. As of the writing of this book, 11 percent of Americans drink 88 percent of the wine according to contemporary wine gossip magazine the Wine Spectator. In the Insider’s Wine Report we gave the results of the wine tastings that we were holding with increasing frequency, as we tried to gain product knowledge. This growing knowledge impressed me with how little we knew about food, so in 1969, we launched a parallel series of blind tastings of branded foods: mayonnaise, canned tuna, hot dogs, peanut butter, and so on. The plan was to select the winner, and sell it “at the lowest shelf price in town.” To report these results, I designed the Insider’s Food Report, which began publication in 1970. It deliberately copied the physical layout of Consumer Reports: the 8.5” x 11” size, the width of columns, and the typeface (later changed). Other elements of design are owed to David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man. The numbered paragraphs, the boxes drawn around the articles, are all Ogilvy’s ideas. I still think his books are the best on advertising that I’ve ever read and I recommend them. Another inspiration was Clay Felker, then editor of New York magazine, the best-edited publication of that era. New York’s motto was, “If you live in New York, you need all the help you can get!” The Insider’s Food Report borrowed this, as “The American housewife needs all the help she can get!” And in the background was the Cassandra-like presence of Ralph Nader, then at the peak of his influence. I felt, however, that all the consumer magazines, never mind Mr. Nader, were too paranoid, too humorless. To leaven the loaf, I inserted cartoons. The purpose of the cartoons was to counterpoint the rather serious, expository text; and, increasingly, to mock Trader Joe’s pretensions as an authority on anything.

Colin Wilson, Criminal History of Mankind, op. cit.: Wilson presents a theory of the Violent Male, backed up by criminological and historical data from the past 3000 years, and some current anthropological data on our earlier ancestors. He claims the Violent Male basically acts like Van Vogt's Right Man: he can never admit he might be wrong about anything. His ego definition, as it were, demands that he is always Right, nearly everybody else is always Wrong, and he must "punish" them for their Wrongness. He despises the "softness" of "emotions" and thinks most people are fools. As such, he sounds like the Authoritarian Personality described by such psychologists as Fromm and Adorno; what makes him Violent is a particular savage intensity of what I have called modeltheism. The Right Man, in addition to the above traits, has a basically paranoid attitude toward people: he thinks they are all rotten; they have all cheated him; they are always cheating; they are sneaks; they are liars; they are, in fact, rotten bastards. He is going to be the rottenest bastard of all to get back at them.

I thought, “Cosmic intelligence is not a gaseous vertebrate,” which was Thomas Henry Huxley’s description of the Christian God. It does not have a penis, so it is not a “He”. I can’t think of it as an Eastern potentate or king. All the Christian symbology, “Our Almighty King or Lord,” “Our Great Father,” etc., seems to me to be a continuation of infantile thinking projected onto the universe. I don’t think the universe is a punishing father. I don’t think it has any of the traits of an old paranoid man. It’s impossible for me to think of cosmic intelligence peeking into bedrooms, taking notes and giving people gold stars for making love the right way and black stars for doing it the wrong way. All that seems absurd to me. So, I can’t take Christianity seriously as an intellectual force. It’s a continuation of infantile anxieties. And so, the same goes for Judaism and Islam. As far as the Western World is concerned, I’m an atheist.

nearly every cult is headed by a single controlling leader. He—it’s usually a man—has a consuming ego, attacks his enemies, lashes out in anger, has an absolute belief that he’s correct, won’t listen to advice or criticism, is paranoid and craves worship and adulation.

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out. Like religious millenarians, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. “Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”4 The apocalypticism of the paranoid style runs dangerously near to hopeless pessimism, but usually stops short of it.

I'm so glad I turned the corner, man 'Cause I was sick of feelin' rough I was getting paranoid about the silliest of stuff

Shakespeare discovered that you can make anything shine. You can have riveting heroes and riveting villains. You can make a play about a protagonist who murders his wife in paranoid jealousy, and have that man not be a flat, one-note monster, but a profoundly tragic human. You can have an entire play about a man vacillating back and forth in indecision, and have that character tower above all theatre as the pinnacle lead role of any male actor’s career. You can have weird side-characters who just pop on for a moment, but strike absurdly poignant and moving emotional notes. And not because Shakespeare was so good at writing, but because he found something worth writing about. What breakthroughs lie undiscovered, just there, right there, right in front of us? Shakespeare was just trying to write an interesting play. Look at what he uncovered.

I have to admit, he’s building a very strong case. But I have to remember that I am talking to a man with paranoid schizophrenia. A man who has been hearing voices telling him to do terrible things, and he has decided it wasn’t necessary for him to take his medications. Of course he’s going to think something suspicious is going on. That’s part of his disease. But there’s some kind of rational explanation for everything. There’s got to be.

This break in was meant to send a message to Gerrart—not to kill him, but to make a point. To make him afraid. To make the man who hunted Veil Worshippers and stole their artifacts go from superstitious to paranoid. To taunt him before the assassin was hired to kill him and every other collector in gruesome ways.

E-mail madness, or e-mailopathy, is the name I have for the psychological disorder where people are so overwhelmed by the waves of e-mail they receive that they protect their psyche by never reading any of it. Instead they skim e-mails quickly and write and send replies even quicker, like a paranoid, drunk blindfolded man pulling the trigger of a fully loaded AK-47. What they don't realize is if they send waves of bad e-mail out, they're guaranteed to get waves of bad e-mail back, especially if the person on the other end has the same disorder they do.

I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn’t even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self—the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass—had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.

Civilization itself seemed to be burning in the fire, my hopes, the hopes of women, our hopes for our planet, and for peace. I thought of all those thinkers burned at the stake, all those who stood up against the forces and orthodoxies of their time, and I felt myself and my whole disenfranchised kind bound now by strong chains and engulfed by the awful blaze, the West itself on fire, Rome burning, the barbarians not at the gates but within, our own barbarians, nurtured by ourselves, coddled and glorified by ourselves, enabled by ourselves, as much our own as our children, rising like savage children to burn the world that made them, claiming to save it even as they set it ablaze. It was the fire of our doom and it would take half a century or more to rebuild what it destroyed. Yes, I suffer from hyperbole, it is the previously existing condition for which I need healthcare, but just sometimes a paranoid man is really being pursued, just sometimes the world is more heightened, more exaggerated, more hyperbolically infernal than even a hyperbolist-infernalist could ever, at his wildest, have dreamed.

Tant blinked. “That’s it? That could have been anything.” “I survived many an ambush by being a paranoid old man,” Broden informed him drolly. “I listen to me instincts. A flash of light coming from near the foothills be queer—no man has business being over there unless he be up to no good.

There’s another element too: nearly every cult is headed by a single controlling leader. He—it’s usually a man—has a consuming ego, attacks his enemies, lashes out in anger, has an absolute belief that he’s correct, won’t listen to advice or criticism, is paranoid and craves worship and adulation.

John Chen was a paranoid. He knew this about himself, just as he knew he had low self-esteem, a poor self-image, and a cornucopia of insecurities. But he also knew an enemy when he saw one. Even paranoids had enemies.

Given that Dumpty is such a crude, paranoid, petulant, cowardly, vicious liar, con man, and crook, would you want to work in an office where he was in charge? Would you want to join his downtrodden White House staff or the weird cast of characters in his cabinet? Would you want him to invest your life savings for you? Would you want to sit next to him at a dinner party, picnic, or sporting event? Would you want to carpool or (God forbid!) drive cross-country with him? Would you hire him to babysit your toddler or fix him up with your best friend’s daughter? Would you ask him to speak at your own memorial service? If you answer no to all of these questions (and how could you not?) then why in the world would you entrust your country’s future and the future of this fragile planet to him? Pause for a moment and contemplate your own contradictory leanings.