James O'Brien > 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

“There is no point having a mind unless you're willing to change it.”
― James O'Brien

“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

“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

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

“Either you think about things and try to understand them or you reach for relatively empty soundbites and slogans which excuse you from the difficult business of trying to understand things.”
― James O'Brien

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“And of course, [Boris Johnson will] never get questioned like this over at the BBC while the political editor remains a fully paid-up member of the Boris Johnson Admiration Society. So how does he get away with it? Andrew points out that factory resets obviously weren't covered in the technology lessons that Boris Johnson received from Jennifer Arcuri. Again, it's a funny joke. It's a good line, but he was the Prime Minister, and everyone knew he was a liar. Is it all about that guy that rang in when Donald Trump was here. That I always remember saying ‘but you must know he's lying’. Donald Trump was giving a speech in London about the size of the crowds outside the building he was in. And we had a camera outside the building he was in. We were looking at no crowds. And that simple juxtaposition of rhetorical claim by a politician with observable reality was chilling. It was spine tingling. I can claim that there are huge crowds, huge crowds, the biggest crowds, the greatest crowds outside this building. And I said, ‘how does it work? How does that happen?’ And someone rang me and said, ‘I know he's a liar, but it really upsets people like you and Sadiq Khan.’ And at the time I laughed but maybe that's all there is. Maybe your life - and sorry this is going to sound quite rude - but maybe your life is so weird, and your personality is so twisted that you find the frustration of people who care about the truth the closest you ever get to feeling joy. Is that it? Nadine Dorries watches Boris Johnson lie and claims that he's the most trustworthy person on the planet. What is wrong with her? It's not really a question about what's wrong with him; what's wrong with her?

Whatever transpires at this inquiry or whatever emerges during these hours of evidence, I can tell you this: there will be a significant number of people who think that Boris Johnson has done nothing wrong or that he is somehow the victim of another witch hunt. You remember? It was a witch hunt when he was caught banged to rights by a parliamentary committee containing a majority of conservatives after even Chris Bryant had stepped down to avoid any accusations or allegations - false allegations – really, of impartiality. And they still called it a witch hunt. It would have been a witch unless the committee consisted entirely of 14 Nadine Dorries clones. That's the only circumstances in which those people would have claimed that he could receive a fair trial.

Where do you even begin today? Do you begin with the 5,000 WhatsApp messages that a man who was in charge of the nuclear code somehow doesn't understand and can't find? I don't know. So, what is your theory now because I don't think I've got one any more. I watch him now, and I feel something very new, very different to what I thought when he was in power because when he was in power there is an urgency to the situation. There is a desperate need to share with the population the awfulness that they apparently can't see. Just now that he's not in power any more, it's almost as if I've allowed the full horror of what he represents to bubble to the surface. It’s now that he can't actually break anything, it's a retrospective reflection upon the abject awfulness of him. I mean the unbelievable awfulness of this man, the things that he's done. You can begin with Brexit. The lies that he's told, the damage that he's done. The contempt in which he holds all the things we're raised to believe are important: rules, obligations, standards, behaviours, fidelity, honesty, kindness, friendship, loyalty, all of these things we teach our children matter. And Boris Johnson teaches us that you can become the most powerful person in the country by treating all of those things with absolute contempt.”
― James O'Brien

“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

“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

“Hate, at its heart, is about the exercise of power. In my experience, public hate usually involves the exercise of one, unhealthy, type of power in an effort to disguise or deny the absence of another, altogether healthier, type.”
― James O'Brien, How Not To Be Wrong: The Art of Changing Your Mind

“These days, I am able to see that life is defined by two forces: the external and the internal. We sometimes seem so completely conditioned to believe that our happiness depends upon external forces, over which we can exercise next to no control, that we forget not only that it is determined by the internal, but also that we can, with help and guidance, exercise some very real control over that. Next time you catch yourself criticising or mocking someone for some aspect of their existence over which they have little or no control, try asking yourself why you care about it. I never cease to be stunned by how often, when I try this simple exercise, I turn out to have no answer at all.”
― James O'Brien, How Not To Be Wrong: The Art of Changing Your Mind

“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

“In other words, David Cameron and George Osborne created the dissatisfaction and distress that would prompt many people to vote for Brexit.”
― James O'Brien, How They Broke Britain

“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

“The lies are of a scale and of a nature that in modern political life I think you can only compare to Donald Trump. I don't think anybody has lied or can lie as casually and as cooly and as completely as Boris Johnson does - except Boris Johnson. We have learned over the last few weeks that his closest colleagues thought he was diabolical. The cabinet secretary that Boris Johnson appointed because he would prove to be, or he was believed to be, a soft touch has described Boris Johnson as being utterly unfit for the job. The advisor that he brought in as a sort of mastermind - having overseen Brexit - Dominick Cummings has described Johnson in terms that you would reserve for your worst enemies. These are the people working closest by him. The only person who's had anything vaguely warm to say about him is Matt Hancock and let me tell you why. They've shaken hands on it. I'd bet my house on some sort of gentleman's... let's rephrase that... I'd bet my house on some sort of charlatan’s agreement behind the scenes that they won't slag each other off because everybody else is telling the truth about them - about Johnson and about Hancock. Hancock's uselessness facilitated and enabled by Johnson's uselessness, by Johnson's moral corruption effectively. And now the lies begin. 5,000 WhatsApp messages. ‘No idea. No, no, no, no idea. Don't know. Don't know technical people. Uh... factory reset. Don't know. Bleep, bleep.’

And then the classic: the flooding of the Zone. With so much manure that it's hard to know where to start. ‘We may have made mistakes’ is one of the latest statements to come out. Turns up 3 hours early so that he doesn't have to walk the gamut of people congregating to remember their lost loved ones and to share their feelings with the man that they consider to be partly responsible for their death. Absolutely extraordinary scenes, truly extraordinary scenes. How does he get away with it? Hugo Keith is a much tougher inquisitor than Lindsay flipping Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons. He's a much tougher inquisitor than any of the interviewers that Boris Johnson deigns to have his toes tickled by on a regular basis. He's a much tougher interviewer or scrutineer than the newspaper editors who have given him half a million pounds a year to write columns or already published articles about why he's the real victim in this story. Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph today writing an article before Boris Johnson has given a single syllable of evidence, claiming that Boris Johnson is the real victim of this. I'd love him to go and read that out to the Covid families assembled outside the inquiry. And remember it was Daily Telegraph columnists and former editors that convened at the Club with Jacob Rees-Mogg and others to launch the Save Owen Paterson Society after another one of these charlatans was found to have breached parliamentary standards. Their response of course was not to advise their ally to accept the punishment that was coming his way but to attempt to get him off the hook and rip up the rule book under which he'd been found to be guilty.”
― James O'Brien

“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

“A xenophobe is someone who attacks people born somewhere else as a way of denying that his own life has become so small and (in his secret heart) worthless that he has to pretend a geographical accident is some sort of achievement. Moreover, he has to hate everybody who didn’t win the bogus jackpot in order to shore up the notion that his ‘prize’ has any real value at all.”
― James O'Brien, How Not To Be Wrong: The Art of Changing Your Mind

“equality can feel like oppression to people who have always been privileged.”
― James O'Brien, How Not To Be Wrong: The Art of Changing Your Mind

“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

“British children who grew up during ‘austerity’ are measurably shorter than both previous generations and their European counterparts.”
― James O'Brien, How They Broke Britain