Christopher Booker > Quotes

“The kind of self-righteous intolerance once associated with the more puritanical forms of religion and the more extreme forms of Socialism now reappeared to promote the 'rights' of women, homosexuals, racial minorities, the disabled and any group of people who could be portrayed as being 'below the line' and therefore discriminated against...Unconsciously they were using the belief that they were acting in the name of selfless moral principle simply as a cloak for asserting their ego, and as a means to enjoy feelings of moral superiority. In the cause of 'toleration' and promoting collective 'rights,' they had become possessed by a fanatical and humorless intolerance.”
― Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories

“At the beginning of a full five-stage Tragedy, the central figure is always part of a community, a network of relationships, linked to other people by ties of loyalty, friendship, family or marriage. And one of the most important things which happens to such heroes and heroines as they embark on their tragic course is that they begin to break those bonds of loyalty, friendship and love (even if, initially, they may form other alliances). It is the very essence of Tragedy that the hero or heroine should become, step by step, separated from other people. Often they separate themselves in the most obvious, violent and final way possible, by causing other people's deaths.”
― Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories

“consistently and comprehensively they have been deceived.”
― Christopher Booker, The Great Deception: Can the European Union survive?

“2009/2010, the ‘consensus’ suffered its three most damaging blows yet: the release of the Climategate emails between the little group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC establishment; the collapse in Copenhagen of the long-planned bid to agree a new global climate treaty, again essentially because of a division between developing nations and the West; a series of scandals that revealed that the most widely-quoted and alarming claims in the 2007 IPCC report had not been based on science at all, but on claims made in press releases and false reports put out by climate activists.”
― Christopher Booker, Global Warming: A Case Study in Groupthink: How science can shed new light on the most important "non-debate" of our time

“Introduced by de Gaulle to protect France’s ‘vital interests’, when there was a possibility that Britain would use it, the French wanted it abolished.”
― Christopher Booker, The Great Deception: Can the European Union survive?

“But for 30 years the way this has all come about has given expert observers cause for increasing puzzlement. In particular they have questioned: the speed with which the belief that human carbon dioxide emissions were causing the world dangerously to warm came to be proclaimed as being shared by a ‘consensus’ of the world’s climate scientists; the nature and reliability of much of the evidence being cited to support that belief; the failure of global temperatures to rise in accordance with the predictions of the computer models on which the ‘consensus’ ultimately rested. But there was also the peculiarly hostile and dismissive nature of the response by supporters of the ‘consensus’ to those who questioned all this, a group that included many eminent scientists and other experts.”
― Christopher Booker, Global Warming: A Case Study in Groupthink: How science can shed new light on the most important "non-debate" of our time