How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong Quotes

“Despite the title of this book, it is refreshing, in an age of increasingly reductionist and binary debate, to recognise the importance of sometimes saying the three most undervalued words in the English language: I don’t know.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“The cultural event being threatened in this case was Christmas, that most Anglo-Saxon of festivals whereby the birth of a Jewish baby in a Middle Eastern stable two thousand years ago is commemorated.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“Take an angry person, tell them you feel their pain, give them a target for their anger and help them to switch off their brain.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“The reason why conversations like this are simultaneously so frustrating and revealing is that people like him have lost the desire to question what they are being told. Their bespoke, unchallenged diet of ‘news’, augmented we now know by Facebook algorithms and deliberately fake stories, is so unvaried that the possibility that it might be largely bogus is never entertained”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“He’s angry because he has spoken his mind but has now been asked to explain himself; he is being asked to think. The conflation of ‘freedom of speech’ with ‘freedom to say silly things without being challenged’ and, more, ‘freedom to insist that people have to listen to me even if they think I’m ridiculous and/or dangerous’ is rarely quite as glaring as in this case.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“there are plenty who employ altogether more sophisticated language and sophistry to make similar points, demand that their right to free speech be respected, what they are really demanding is that their speech be free from scrutiny.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“comforting lies deliver more clicks, viewers, listeners and profits than uncomfortable truths.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“I arrived at this conclusion partly because, like most people who have latterly concluded that membership of the European Union provided the United Kingdom with rather more benefits than problems, I didn’t have particularly strong convictions about the issue until after the decision to leave it had been taken. The more I read and researched as part of the preparation for my show, the more I realised how sketchy my previous understanding had been. And when ‘no deal’ began to seem possible, speaking to people in the transport and haulage industries who understood precisely how catastrophic it would be left me as embarrassed as I was shocked.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“were born on third base but go through life thinking they hit a triple’.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“Arthur and his partner – shifting fridges is a two man job – are not employed by the delivery company directly, but rather have a contract that requires them to undertake a certain amount of deliveries while paying the company for the use of their liveried van. You read that correctly. Arthur pays for the privilege of going to work in a van owned by a company that pays him no sick pay, holiday pay or pension contributions. While technically self-employed, he is obviously unable to work for any other company or employer except over and above his already full-time schedule. Indeed, if one of them is ill or otherwise indisposed and unable to source their own replacement, the rent for the van is still due. It means that, in twenty-first-century Britain, getting sick while holding down a relatively menial job sees the sick person not just lose their wage for the days they’re off sick, but actually pay money to their employer (who’s not technically their employer) for every day they’re off the road.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“Ray: I was just listening to what you said about the internet melting our brains and I wanted to tell you what happened to me. James: Go on. Ray: I don’t really know any Muslims, but I started reading stuff online a few months ago, the EDL and that, and the more I read the angrier I got. James: Angry about what? Ray: Angry about these people poncing off us while plotting to kill us. James: Wow. Ray: I know, but they’d back it up by quoting from the Koran or the Hadiths and kind of prove all their points about Muslims without ever actually talking to any. James: So what happened? Ray: My wife told me to stop. James: What do you mean? Ray: I was getting angry with her, with the family, with everyone really. I’d start trying to convince everyone that we were under siege and they just couldn’t see it. 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. James: What happened? Ray: I was sorted in less than a week. Never look at that stuff anymore. Couldn’t be happier.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“I was never exposed to much more than playground ribbing, but I do remember thinking, even then, that the people who sought to conflate people like me and my dad with the men and women who detonated bombs in two Birmingham pubs in 1974, killing 21 people, were in many ways doing the work of the terrorists for them. The more fractured and divided a society becomes, the more fertile the ground is for terrorists to plant their views and ideologies.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“Whether it is the immigrant family with an enormous council house or a horribly misguided decision to take the Union Flag down from a council building, these instances are news precisely because they are as rare as hen’s teeth. In the hands of an editor like Gallagher, however, they are served up as though commonplace, as proof that ‘we’ are somehow being overwhelmed by ‘them’. It’s heady stuff and leads to people like Bob not even realising that they have developed pungent opinions while possessed of precisely no proof to support them.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“for many, the hate is actually more about the hater than the hated,”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“Theresa May took this aversion to thinking to its apotheosis when she declared that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ shortly after becoming prime minister in July 2016. Even by the standards of modern British politics, this is a slogan of such sweeping vacuity that it beggars belief that she could utter the words with a straight face. Ask yourself now what it actually means. Consider the events of the following months and years and ask yourself whether she could have been doing anything other than using it to discourage thinking, to avoid facts and to postpone reality. You don’t need to be William of Ockham to conclude that this is the only – never mind the simplest – explanation for her choice of words. The truly nasty element of the whole enterprise is the way it treats the Brexit-supporting British public as idiots. Throw them a fatuous soundbite, the thinking goes, and they’ll be so busy chomping away on it that they won’t notice we haven’t got the first idea what Brexit is going to mean.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“When you speak regularly to people persuaded that the evidence of their own eyes and ears is ‘fake news’ while the demonstrable lies of their leader are somehow the truth, you realise that the answers are, again, not political but psychological.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“The ‘nanny state’ is a phrase now used exclusively to describe mostly good and important attempts to prioritise citizen welfare over corporate greed; and ‘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.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“I’m shocked and totally dismayed at how a picture of me is being circulated on social media. To those individuals who have interpreted and commented on what my thoughts were in that horrific and distressful moment, I would like to say not only have I been devastated by witnessing the aftermath of a shocking and numbing terror attack, I’ve also had to deal with the shock of finding my picture plastered all over social media by those who could not look beyond my attire, who draw conclusions based on hate and xenophobia.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“The conflation of ‘freedom of speech’ with ‘freedom to say silly things without being challenged’ and, more, ‘freedom to insist that people have to listen to me even if they think I’m ridiculous and/or dangerous’ is rarely quite as glaring as in this case.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“It really did pain me that the story above was lifted from the pages of the Daily Telegraph because, perhaps naively, I don’t think that respectable newspapers engaged in this sort of propaganda when I was young and my dad was writing for them. He often talked about the point in his career when the Sun newspaper, not long after it was bought by Rupert Murdoch, started reporting on stories in a way that all the other journalists working on the same story didn’t recognise. Where once the ‘press pack’ would be filing variations on the same theme, Murdoch’s Sun seemed to be reporting a different reality.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“I don’t know why he wanted, perhaps even needed, the narrative of being overwhelmed and under threat to be true. So much so that he made stuff up to prove it. But I know that he embarrassed himself only because he was asked, politely and calmly, to provide some proof of what he claimed and, apparently, believed.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong