I Wear the Black Hat Quotes

“The villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“It has always been my belief that people are remembered for the sum of their accomplishments but defined by their singular failure.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“We all eventually become whatever we pretend to hate.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don’t really “need” anything new, so we only create what we want.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“Is there anything more attractive than a polite person with limitless self-belief? There is not.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“And this, of course, is the central problem with conspiracy theorists — once you inflexibly accept that something is a conspiracy, any contrary evidence has the paradoxical effect of making your case stronger. Every contradiction deepens the conspiracy.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“The reason behind everything always has to be something else entirely.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“Everything (N.W.A.) attempted had to possess criminal undertones. I can only assume they spent hours trying to deduce villainous ways to microwave popcorn (and if they'd succeeded, there would absolutely be a song about it, assumedly titled "Pop Goes the Corn Killa", or "45 Seconds to Bitch Snack").”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“Is there anything more attractive than a polite person with limitless self-belief? There is not. Avoiding villainy is not that different from avoiding loneliness: First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains

“Batman never questions the logic of letting a childhood experience dictate his entire life.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains

“I never feel weird about being the main character in the nontransferable, nonexistent movie of my life. That’s totally fine. What makes me nervous is a growing suspicion that this movie is fucked up and devoid of meaning. The auteur is a nihilist.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains

“I care about strangers when they're abstractions but feel almost nothing when they are literally in front of me. They seem like unnamed characters in a poorly written novel about myself, which was poorly written by me.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“Up until the mid-eighties, there was always a shared assumption that the Right controlled the currency of outrage; part of what made conservatives “conservative” was their discomfort with profanity and indecency and Elvis Presley’s hips. But then — somewhat swiftly, and somehow academically — it felt as if the Left was suddenly dictating what was acceptable to be infuriated over (and always for ideological motives, which is why the modifier “politically” felt essential). This created a lot of low-level anxiety whenever people argued in public.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains

“So often does it happen that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know there is no key.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“I rarely remember the names or faces of nonfictional people”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“(The Eagles' song "Take It Easy") is clearly a problem of a young man, as no one over thirty-five could sustain interest in seven simultaneous relationships unless they're biracial and amazing at golf.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“It also creates a problematic reflection: If a villain is the person who knows the most and cares the least, then a hero is the person who cares too much without knowing anything. It makes every hero seem like Forrest Gump. But it’s not the intelligence that people dislike; it’s the dispassionate application of that intelligence. It’s the calculation. It’s someone who views life as a game where the rules are poorly written and designed for abuse.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“If you hate everything, you’re a banal asshole…but if you don’t hate anything, you’re boring.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“The Constitution is awesome, but still overrated; it’s like Pet Sounds. The wide-scale adoption of political correctness was silly, but not unreasonable. The freedom that was lost was mostly theoretical and rarely necessary. No one is significantly worse off.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“machine powering the modern world is too complicated for the average person to fix or calibrate. And they know this. This is what makes an IT guy different from you. He might make less money, he might have less social prestige, and people might look at him in the cafeteria like he’s a morlock — but he can act however he wants. He can be nice, but only if he feels like it. He can ignore the company dress code. He can lie for”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains

“If you want to experience a free-flowing discourse devoid of limitation, you need to seek the darkest fringes of the Internet (and none of that anonymous bile can bleed back into proper society, because the interpretation always ends up being worse than the original sentiment).”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains

“The future makes the rules.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains

“The most villainous move any person can make is tying a woman to the railroad tracks.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains

“Nobody ever talks about building a time machine in order to go back and kill Judas.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“If you act nice, you’re nice. That’s the whole equation. Nobody cares why you say thank you. Nobody is supposed to care; weirdly, this is something we’re never supposed to question. It’s impractical to incessantly interrogate the veracity of every stranger who seems like a blandly nice citizen. It’s rude. Until proven otherwise, we just accept goodness at face value.
But this is not how it works with badness.
If someone wants to be perceived as a bad person, it’s immediately assumed to have a wider ulterior purpose. Decency is its own reward, but purposeful depravity requires an upside. Moreover, the authenticity of every self-constructed villain is always up for debate, particularly when their specific brand of villainy represents the bedrock of their identity; since we assume normal people would always prefer to be seen as good, those who seem proud of their badness are immediately suspect. They come across as contrived, and that bothers people more than whatever wickedness they assert. It’s a circular construction that sustains the intended reality: We question the sincerity of the man who wants to be evil, because the man who desires evil is almost certainly a liar (which validates his claim, because liars are evil). So perhaps badness is a little like goodness, at least in this one respect. Wanting it is enough to make it real.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“An author I know once explained why writing became so much more difficult in the twenty-first century: “The biggest problem in my life,” he said, “is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“I’ve obliterated three days trying to come up with an elegant way to write what I’m about to write, but I think the least elegant way is probably best: I like Kanye West.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains