40 Paranoia Quotes

Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.

Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction. He was bothered by the people who cheered him in neighboring villages, and he imagined that they were the same cheers they gave the enemy. Everywhere he met adolescents who looked at him with his own eyes, who spoke to him with his own voice, who greeted him with the same mistrust with which he greeted them, and who said they were his sons. He felt scattered about, multiplied, and more solitary than ever. He was convinced that his own officers were lying to him. He fought with the Duke of Marlborough. 'The best friend a person has,' he would say at that time, 'is one who has just died.' (p. 166)

Sometimes I wave to people I don't know. It's very dangerous to wave to someone you don't know because what if they don't have a hand? They'll think you're cocky. 'Look what I got motherfucker! This thing is useful. I'm gonna go pick something up!'

I don`t care how paranoid and irrational this makes me sound, but I know for a fact that the people of Paris want me dead.

I think that the Jews would like to eat me... I think they've got eating Fischer on their minds. They hate my guts. Or maybe they love my guts.

Almost everyone who has been around me turned out to be a secret agent working for the Jews, working for the CIA... The Jews have planted so many of their Jew agents and CIA rats all around me. So many people... Girlfriends, lawyers, everybody almost, turned out to be working for the CIA and the Jews! Unbelievable but true.

I'm not paranoid. I'm not a dope. I'm not like a lot of these... paranoid dopes.

Yossarian - the very sight of the name made him shudder. There were so many esses in it. It just had to be subversive. It was like the word subversive itself. It was like seditious and insidious too, and like socialist, suspicious, fascist and Communist.

On an ordinary day the corridor would have been filled with the early lunch crowd, but now the emptiness gave the place an eerie feeling, as though I were a trespasser and hidden eyes were watching me. Except that I was the only one there and the single sign of life was the light behind my office door. I turned the knob, pushed it open and just stood there a second because something was wrong, sure as hell wrong, and the total silence was as loud as a wild scream. I had the .45 in my hand, crouched and edged to one side, listening, waiting, watching.

Sitting there in paranoid fantasy You can't read minds You always get morose and speculate about the destruction of the universe whenever you come out of starflight. It's your peculiar manifestation of motion sickness.

When I was a fighting-man, the kettle-drums they beat, The people scattered gold-dust before my horses feet; But now I am a great king, the people hound my track With poison in my wine-cup, and daggers at my back.

With time Amin fell into a mania of suspicion and he saw enemies almost everywhere. So he carried out repressions and he himself never spent the night in the same place twice.

So many tried to plot/That I keep a glock beside my head, when will it stop?

You think I am crazy. You will try to give me morphine. Get out of here; you are sacked. Get that medical uniform off. Go home and act as if you had never had anything to do with me.

Just because you're paranoid Don't mean they're not after you.

I dont like jam, I dont want it to know where I am

No memories, just a misery/Paintin a picture of my enemies killin me, in my sleep

Still I, can't breathe, somethings evil in my IV/Cause everytime I breathe, I think they killin me

Proverbs for Paranoids:

They had a track laid out with numbers, mystic numbers- 1, 5: 7, 8, you know: A bit of a broken doll there, some girl keeping lookout with a skipping rope: (mimes skipping rope) in case the clergy came by. 'Run, run, it's the clergy! Run, it's the Pope and everyone.'

Even a paranoid has some real enemies.

I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

When I was a practicing alcoholic, I was unbelievable. One side effect was immense suspicion: I'd come off tour like Inspector Clouseau on acid. 'Where's this cornflake come from? It wasn't here before.

The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.

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. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists 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.

One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.

The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent - in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.

My husband gave me a necklace. It's fake. I requested fake. Maybe I'm paranoid, but in this day and age, I don't want something around my neck that's worth more than my head.

Surrounded by assassins!