Daniel Finkelstein > Quotes

“All of this is more than history. The Owen critique of the Jenkins position remains a sharp one and directly relevant to Labour moderates. If they decided they could no longer stick Corbyn, what sort of party would they create? What is the electoral base of a straightforwardly liberal party? Labour voters least likely to be impressed by Corbyn are most likely to be hawkish on defence, tough on immigration and sympathetic to Brexit.”
― Daniel Finkelstein, Everything in Moderation

“I don’t care where Chelsea’s money comes from as long as there is plenty of it.”
― Daniel Finkelstein, Everything in Moderation

“You cannot, in other words, judge the quality of a decision by its outcome.”
― Daniel Finkelstein, Everything in Moderation

“have often repeated my grandmother’s words – ‘while the Queen is safe in Buckingham Palace, we are safe in Hendon Central”
― Daniel Finkelstein, Everything in Moderation

“to journalistic”
― Daniel Finkelstein, Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad

“Give me any day a politician who has been special adviser to the agriculture minister over a man on a white charger come to purify the nation and sweep away its corruption. For I well know who will be doing the sweeping and who will be the swept.”
― Daniel Finkelstein, Everything in Moderation

“He noted the signs. The speakers on the streets talking of ‘the desirability of plundering Jewish businesses, of murder and manslaughter’; the leaflets in which ‘we Jews are once again being burdened with the accusation of ritual murder for the purpose of manufacturing goat sausages’ and which warn against ‘sexual intercourse with Jews and other roundheads’; the campaigns to boycott Jewish shops; the public letters that announce that the Jews deserve death; the public promises that ‘we will shortly free ourselves, completely and mercilessly, from these bloodsuckers, the Jews’. And he noted behind it all, the money financing antisemitic militia and the targeting of workers’ councils by paid agitators. Is this, he asked, ‘the thanks of the fatherland to the thousands upon thousands of Jewish soldiers who shed their life’s blood for us all, without considering religion or origins, and who are now beneath cemetery lawns’? He resists adding, as he might have done, how near he came to lying beneath the cemetery lawn himself. And he finished with an appeal to the decent Germans, whom all his life he believed he lived among, to see what was happening and to act. The morality of any decent human being demands that the good be encouraged and the evil resisted. Anyone who does not wish to see the blood of citizens flowing in the streets, or that history should report bestial murders and violence to our descendants must be prepared to fight pogrom antisemitism. Antisemitic rabble-rousing is the precursor of anarchy. But good was not encouraged, and evil was not resisted, and history did indeed report bestial murders and violence to Alfred’s descendants.”
― Daniel Finkelstein, Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad

“mighty antisemitic storm has broken over us, a storm that has not come about according to the laws of physics, but rather by means of unlimited funds in the hands of skilfully led organizations, which have stimulated and promoted it and are zealously seeking to further it,’ read the opening words of Prelude to Pogroms?, the tract he published in 1919 as his first major contribution to the fight.”
― Daniel Finkelstein, Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad

“My mother likes to describe pessimists as those who can only see the holes in the Emmenthal.”
― Daniel Finkelstein, Everything in Moderation