David Baddiel > Quotes

“For a long time, I used to think that I had a man's brain that I thought more like a man than a woman. But now I've come to realise that whatever it is I do think like, it's not like men; because men don't really think like men, they think like boys.”
― David Baddiel, Whatever Love Means

“That's the thing about your destiny how are you supposed to know when it arrives? How are you supposed to recognise it from random life?”
― David Baddiel, Whatever Love Means

“We live in a culture now where impact is more important than intent; where how things are taken is more significant than how they are meant.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“Yeah! "I love you" is subject to the law of diminishing returns; like one or two other critical weekly elements of a relationship, it loses a bit of thrilling value every time you get it out.'... That's what happens with "I love you", that same phrase that you once shouted Hollywood or Heathcliff-like in the lashing raining, now- now you are saying it dumbly at the end of every phone conversation, a follow-on from," I'll be back for dinner." Once it came out spontaneous rush, it forced itself out; now it's reflex.”
― David Baddiel

“I said earlier that being white was not just about skin color, but about security. That’s what white privilege represents. White really means: safe.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“law of Schrödinger’s Whites, a brilliant conceit that I am not responsible for, in which Jews are white or non-white depending on the politics of the observer, in this context Krug’s Jewishness enhances the story.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“in 2018, 60 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States were perpetrated against Jews (by contrast 18.6 percent targeted Muslims).”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“Some religious ideas may be on the decline, but not, I would say, human exceptionalism. Fewer people might believe in God than they used to, yet, although veganism is on the rise, most of us are still perfectly happy with the fact that we kill and eat huge amounts of animals when we don’t really need to. Most of us don’t bother with questioning this much. But I assume, if asked why we all think it’s OK to kill animals and not humans for meat, most would agree that humans are more important, more sacred, more valuable, more entitled to life than animals. There is secular backing for this idea – we have culture and language, and animals don’t (not true, they just have different culture and language) – but at heart it’s a hangover from religion. It’s a hangover from the notion that God made us in His image, and thus we sit at the top of the tree of life.”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters. And it’s this racist mythology that’s in the air when the left pause before putting Jews into their sacred circle.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“What they tend to say is: we stand against antisemitism and all types of racism. As a mantra, this was heard again and again between 2015 and 2019, and continues to be in the ongoing arguments around Corbyn at the time of writing. It sounds good. It sounds right. But to these ears, the reflex need always to follow the phrase antisemitism with “and all types of racism” is the left’s All Lives Matter.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“had”
― David Baddiel, AniMalcolm

“Martin Amis once said, of death, that ‘after forty, it’s a full-time job looking the other way’. I sometimes wonder if, at any adult age, it’s also a full-time job – although a less conscious one – looking the “other way’. I sometimes wonder if, at any adult age, it’s also a full-time job – although a less conscious one – looking the other way from the killing of animals. I consider most statements on the internet and elsewhere of people claiming to be on the right side of history as always specious, but if you are foolishly going to try and imagine the moral order of the “future, the one thing I’d be happy to put a small bet on is that in three hundred years’ time people will see our industrial slaughter of animals as a type of genocide.”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“But still: antiracists need to listen more to the enemy. Because antiracism only exists to fight racists; it only has meaning oppositionally. If there were no racists, there would be no antiracists. And the racists say: Jews are not white. The Nazis said it all the time—the project of the Jews, as far as they were concerned, was to undermine the Aryan white races. And the exclusion of Jews from the category of whiteness is still key to present-day white supremacists.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“being white is not about skin color, but security. It means you are protected because you are a member of the majority culture.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“Because another thing we look away from, in the killing of animals, is just how much they are like us. One of the things the internet has done is circulate, on a vast scale, short films of animals being cute. A lot of the time this means: being like us. I watched, once, some YouTube footage of a pig who had been raised by a specific human and allowed to grow old. In the clip the pig sees this human again after several years of separation and rushes over to the edge of the pigsty, braying and trying to leap the fence with what seemed to my eyes like joy: like the joy of recognition – indeed, of love. If you post links to such films approvingly, cynics – men (always men) born with the knowledge that they know best – will tell you, with lordly condescension, that you are anthropomorphising. By which they mean projecting human emotions and responses onto animals. When they say this, they tend not “to consider the possibility that if this were not anthropomorphism – if the pig just, as the film clearly suggests, had empathy and memory and other-directedness, if it was really overjoyed to see the person who reared it again years later, if it was capable of love – if the pig were showing the big emotions which we humans think make us special, then complacently slaughtering and eating pigs might become a bit problematic.”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“But also, the cynic may have to accept something else. That he, as a human, is not exceptional. He might have to accept that perhaps, when you look at how animals, certainly mammals, behave – how they have sex with their genitals, and shit from their anuses, and eat with their mouths – and how they appear, with their noses and ears and eyes and feet and hands/paws – that we are just one branch of multiple DNA outcomes. And accepting that – properly, viscerally accepting it – may not just throw a spanner in the works of complacently eating hot dogs. It also must mean that there is no God. Not least because clearly, coming back to the fact of that ongoing genocide, God does not care about the animals.”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“The idea that collective responsibility is racist has got lost in the righteous fury.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“It smacks of an idea that somehow Jews—non-Israeli Jews—must apologize for Israel: that Jews—non-Israeli Jews—should feel a little bit ashamed of Israel, and must, before they are allowed into any kind of public conversation, make some kind of supplicant-like statement to that effect.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“This very subject—the inequity of offense that right-thinking people take around differing hate words—came up when a friend of mine, a man who very much would be thought of as a progressive, questioned me about this central premise of the film. He said: but the Y-word isn’t as bad as the N-word? I said: why not? He said: because Jews are rich.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“A study by the non-partisan wealth research firm New World Wealth found that 56.2 percent of the 13.1 million millionaires in the world were Christian, while 6.5 percent were Muslim, 3.9 percent were Hindu, and 1.7 percent were Jewish. In the U.S., 48 percent of Hindus have a yearly household income of $100,000 or more, and 70 percent have at least $75,000, which makes them the highest-earning ethnic group. But”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“Yeet!” said Jack, shambling out of his room. “Walking is for Normies. It’s a dank meme.”
― David Baddiel, The Taylor TurboChaser

“The world had moved on. But it seems that it had forgotten something; it had left one racism behind.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“I can’t really speak for the right, but it seems to me that people on the right are less bothered about a virtuous self-image.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“He offered me some free cheese too,” said Stewart. “Sounded quite nice.” “NEVER MIND FREE ********56 CHEESE,”
― David Baddiel, AniMalcolm

“Barry lay in his bed, fuming. He’d gone straight to his room, without cleaning his teeth or anything, and slammed the door. But it had just come back at him as his door didn’t really shut properly unless you closed it carefully, jiggling the handle up as you did it. So he’d had to do that after his slam, which felt completely at odds with a show of rage. He lay there in his onesie – a zebra one, with ears and a tail, which was too big for him because it had been passed down from Lukas – and stared at his room. His head”
― David Baddiel, The Blockbuster Baddiel Collection: The Parent Agency; The Person Controller; AniMalcolm

“really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really,”
― David Baddiel, Birthday Boy

“A sacred circle is drawn around those whom the progressive modern left are prepared to go into battle for, and it seems as if the Jews aren't in it.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“Waiters haven’t dressed like this since 1972,”
― David Baddiel, The Boy Who Got Accidentally Famous

“Humans invest emotionally in story in a very intense way. It matters to them. And they are not unaware of the fact that they're investing in is fictional even while they build all sorts of cosmetic realities around it.”
― David Baddiel, The God Desire

“In his bedroom, Barry looked at himself in the mirror. He wasn’t, it has to be said, entirely comfortable in the suit. Peevish had helped him put it on, which had felt a little weird as his mum and dad hadn’t helped him dress for a long time. But then again he didn’t normally wear suits. And certainly not shirts with cufflinks. And bow ties. Well, he had once worn a bow tie, to a party of”
― David Baddiel, The Parent Agency