I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called
me a paranoid little weirdo. In morse code.
-Emo Phillips
No matter how paranoid I get, it's never enough to keep up.
The question is not whether I'm paranoid, it's whether I'm paranoid enough.
The truly paraniod are rarely conned.
Doesn't matter if I'm paranoid - they're still after me.
I sincerely believe people talk about me. Mine would be a pretty meaningless existance if they didn't.
Why are some people terrified of "black helicopters" and don't even notice that they are being monitored almost constantly by the whole network of obvious surveilance cameras, credit cards, ATMs, EZpass, company ID/access cards, magazine subscriptions, SSNs, taxes, fees, video rentals, Internet firewall recording, 'cookies', ... ?
Paranoia: the belief that someone cares.
Paranoia is the belief in a hidden order behind the visible.
When everyone is out to get you, paranoia is only good thinking.
"Paranoia is knowing all the facts."
- Woody Allen
"Paranoia is just another word for longevity."
- Laurell K. Hamilton, The Laughing Corpse
"Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness."
"Paranoia is reality seen on a finer scale."
- Philo Gant, Strange Days
"The issue is not whether you are paranoid, the issue is whether you
are paranoid enough."
- Max, Strange Days
"Why are you so paranoid, Mulder?"
"Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's because I find it hard to trust anybody."
- Scully & Mulder, The X-Files, "Ascension"
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're
always afraid. You step out
of line, the man come and
take you away.
"I don't agonize over decisions as much these days. The criteria of
what's important to me is clear. The insecurity that you feel, and the
paranoia that you feel, have been around for a long time -- you know it's
a liar because it's been lying to you all along -- every time you start
something new. You get used to it, and you sort of go, 'Oh, you're showing
up again, well f*** you.'"
- John Cusack
Freedom is just a hallucination created by a pathological lack of paranoia.
Paranoia doesn't mean the whole world really isn't out to get you.
If you ever wanted to know what a person with acute paranoia looks like, just keep watching.
I have the power to channel my imagination into ever-soaring levels of suspicion and paranoia.
Paranoia is heightened awareness.
Paranoia is a social disease--you get it from screwing other people.
"Paranoia is the delusion that your enemies are organized."
- Arthur D. Hlavaty.
"This is the Nineties, Bubba, and there is no such thing as Paranoia.
It's all true."
- Hunter S Thompson
"There are two kinds of paranoia: Total, and insufficient. I am
both, because if you think you are sufficiently paranoid, you're not."
- Guildenstern, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
"The truly paranoid are clever enough to not *act* paranoid."
- Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation
"When everyone _is_ out to get to you, being paranoid isn't going to
help." -
- Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation
"When did you get so paranoid?"
"When they started plotting against me."
- The Paper
"Paranoia is only the leading edge of the discovery that everything
in the world is connected."
- `The Illuminatus Trilogy'
When you've been through everything I have, paranoia is merely a precaution!
Paranoia is not the belief that everybody's out to get you -- they are.
Paranoia is the belief that everybody's conspiring to get you.
The greater the concentration of power, the greater the paranoia it generates about its need to destroy everything outside itself.
I love this job. Nothing like paranoia and neurosis. Who needs a Coke habit? I've got journalism!!
There's something inherently American about paranoia. Given the increasing scarcity of rational things to fear in 20th century American society, we dream up theories whose inevitable result is the chaotic disruption of our comfortable, orderly life-usually with dastardly consequences. I think we get a perverse thrill that comes from it.
"Mulder, are you suggesting that we somehow create our own quirky focal
points of paranoia, as a result of the lack of things that are worth fearing
in our day-to-day lives? That we're not whole as beings without something
to worry about, something to keep our eye on?"
"That's my point exactly, Scully. What if, in a society characterized
by a Goldilocks economy, we can't find anything to worry about? What if
we somehow go looking for things to fear, things that will destroy this
economy, things that will reach every corner of government, every
enterprise, every man, woman, and child?"
- X-Files