How To Be Right… In A World Gone Wrong Quotes
"The true liberal is cursed with a desire, even a duty, to understand other points of view."
"Less talking and more listening has... yielded much more satisfying results."
"Hardly anyone is asked to explain their opinions these days; to outline not just what they believe, but why."
"Financial crises and the ensuing hardening of the daily struggle just to get by have always left populations susceptible to the stoking of ancient hatreds."
"Almost everywhere, blatant lies are offered up as 'balance' to demonstrable truths."
"The most important lesson I have learned in this job is that it usually serves no purpose to respond with counter-claims or condemnations."
"You just did the same thing with schools. The fact that there are more kids in school than ever before is neither necessarily good nor bad. It’s just counting."
"The only answer I’ve come up with after years talking with countless Johns and Bobs and Andys is that they somehow enjoy being frightened."
"The best way to start would be to stop claiming that all Muslims are somehow complicit in acts of terror."
"I was getting angry with her, with the family, with everyone really. The wife said I was making myself ill and making her unhappy and she told me to leave the laptop under the sofa for a month."
"The leaching into the mainstream news that they somehow provide proof that Muslims are fundamentally different from the rest of us – or that they remain committed to the destruction of a society their forebears crossed the world to join – is as daft as it is dangerous."
"I don’t know what’s worse, doing it for money while not believing in it or doing it because you really do believe that ethnicity and geography deliver some sort of innate value to a human being."
"It leads to Frank, from Birkenhead, who I would once have written off as an extremist loon but who now represents a real and growing group of people who don’t have a wife like Ray’s, or any desire to seek the sort of harmony and fellowship that, before doing this job, I used to think we almost all yearned for."
"Muslim listeners generally respond to calls like this by pointing out that they’re too busy doing the school run to be waging war against the kuffir."
"I STILL DON’T know what they think they won."
"It’s not always easy to remember that anger should be directed at the dupers as opposed to the duped, but on this occasion it was simple enough."
"We are encouraged to pick our side based on either decades of deliberately deceitful depictions of the EU as a meddlesome Fourth Reich or on carefully cultivated fears of the country being overrun by foreigners."
"And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp."
"I realised quite early in my broadcasting career that even the most passionately held prejudices are vulnerable to the simplest of questions."
"The habit persists, often to the annoyance of my family as I shout the questions I think an interviewer should be asking at the radio or television."
"This isn’t the place to examine my own relationship with religion, which is complicated to say the least."
"You can fanny about all you like, but a sin is a sin."
"Now conversation is a two-way street, but it’s not an exercise in me asking you a question and you answering a completely different one."
"Why would you want to call Chinese New Year ‘Christmas’, or Children In Need or the Hindu Festival of Light?"
"I think they are going a bit far here. It is political correctness going a bit too far."
"The statement made by one councillor regarding the St George’s flag was not really taken into consideration."
"In the right hands, of course, any request that the resident remove it could and no doubt would be cast as yet another example of ‘political correctness gone mad’."
"But you can have a conversation, arrive at a compromise, agree to disagree. That we so often fail to do so speaks of intransigence on both sides."
"But it is remarkable how rarely the generals – the columnists and demagogues – are asked to explain theirs."
"Every columnist, talk-show host, politician or barrack room lawyer who has talked of ‘Winterval’ in the intervening years could have availed themselves of the real facts in a matter of seconds."
"It’s increasingly obvious to me that it has to be society’s job to establish conventions so clear and so objective that any man behaving like this, whether a Hollywood mogul, a City lawyer or a scaffolder, will be known to have transgressed."
"Once, it was normal to see doctors advertising cigarettes, to own slaves, to be free to rape your wife."
"If a woman doesn’t feel comfortable slapping or chastising or publicly shaming a man who has groped her or propositioned her, then whose job is it?"
"The language is like something from The Handmaid’s Tale."
"Most accounts of how societies fall to fascism cite rampant sexism as a key indicator."
"Determination to combat it should be fuelled by the knowledge that it is not new and, until very recently, these men really did have everything their own way."
"The biggest catalyst for social change in recent years is the #MeToo movement."
"Men won’t change until society changes and, right now, forces seem to be trying to pull society backwards as well as forwards."
"The ‘nanny state’ is a phrase now used exclusively to describe mostly good and important attempts to prioritise citizen welfare over corporate greed."
"‘Classical liberal’ now has nothing to do with Thomas Hobbes or Adam Smith. It’s just a fancy phrase that kids who grew up without ever learning how to share use to describe themselves."
"My late father occasionally said that he didn’t really become ambitious until I came along."
"The difference between us hinges on what the late, great Christopher Hitchens and his friend Martin Amis used to call ‘tramp angst’."
"My ambition was considerable but it was built more, I realise now, on dreams of security rather than status."
"For Dad, life was clearly much more of an adventure and only when the responsibilities of fatherhood settled on him did he determine to strike out in search of the financial security he felt it was his duty to provide."
"The millennials who ring my show to explain, almost blithely, why they will never be able to buy a flat, despite earning considerably more than the average salary, seem to live in a manner best described as ‘genteel hand-to-mouth’."
"If you grow up under one kind of ‘normal’ then it’s very hard to accept that it bears no resemblance at all to the new one."
"They will conceivably have paid enough rent to pay off two or three mortgages on behalf of their landlords, but will own precisely nothing."
"The younger generation seem more resigned to this than angry."
"Of all the lessons I’ve learned from listening daily to people whose lives are very different from mine, this is the most arresting."
"And it moves from arresting to alarming whenever you posit the notion that there are only three ways to halt the runaway train of structural inequality: income tax, property tax, and inheritance tax."