On Paranoia

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.

Doesn't matter if I'm paranoid - they're still after me.

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', ... ?

When everyone is out to get you, paranoia is only good thinking.

"The issue is not whether you are paranoid, the issue is whether you are paranoid enough."
- Max, Strange Days

Freedom is just a hallucination created by a pathological lack of paranoia.

If you ever wanted to know what a person with acute paranoia looks like, just keep watching.

Paranoia is a social disease--you get it from screwing other people.

"This is the Nineties, Bubba, and there is no such thing as Paranoia. It's all true."
- Hunter S Thompson

"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 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.

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