Jonestown Quotes

Yeah, I can make all the tequila in a bottle disappear. It's a talent. Nothing comes easy and talent is something you get but, if you don't develop it, it becomes like an apple; you keep taking bites of it until it's gone. So you have to plant the seeds. Then you have the orchard. And then you have Jonestown. (Josh Homme)

Among other things Jonestown was an example of a definition well known to sociologists of religion: a cult is a religion with no political power.

Tom Wolfe

I've studied Jonestown, radical Islam. They're oftentimes good-hearted people, idealistic, but full of a kind of crushing certainty that eliminates doubt.

Lawrence Wright

Guyana-Cult of the Damned has crawled out from under a rock and into local theaters, and will do nicely as this week's example of the depths to which people will plunge in search of a dollar. The movie is a gruesome version of the Jonestown massacre of 1978, so badly written and directed it illustrates a simple rule of movie exhibition: If a film is nauseating and reprehensible enough in the first place, it doesn't matter how badly it's made - people will go anyway.

Roger Ebert

I did a lot of soul-searching before going public. I was concerned there might be some type of Waco or Jonestown event.

Mark Rathbun

Ladies and gentlemen, every path leads somewhere. That is what a path is all about. The path of segregation leads to lynching every time. The path of antisemitism leads to Auschwitz every time. The path of the cults leads to Jonestown - and we ignore it at our peril.

Maurice Davis

[describing the aftermath of a singles' party] It looked like "Jonestown: The Morning After"! You're trying to wake up people you've never met before. "Hey, Man With No Pants and a Fireman Helmet On... please get up. I gotta go to work. Alright, lock the door when you leave. I just got a new sofa, I don't want anything to happen to it."1.

Jeff Foxworthy

Tribalism is now not just one force in American politics, it's the overwhelming one, and tribalism abhors reality if it impugns the tribe. But you can't have both tribalism and public health. When you turn wearing a simple face mask into a political and cultural symbol of leftism, when you view social distancing as a concession to your enemies, you deeply undermine the power of millions of small impediments to viral outbreak. What we are seeing is whether this tribalism can be sustained even when it costs tens of thousands of lives, even when it means exposing yourself to a deadly virus, even when it is literally more important than your own life. We are entering the Jonestown phase of the Trump cult this summer. It is not going to be pretty.

Andrew Sullivan