Ruby Tuesday

“The line of apologetics is unconvincing to anyone who has studied Michael’s career, in which he began to show himself as a feisty player in his own destiny even before his age hit double figures, and as an independent business negotiator by his mid-teens – in both cases in defiance of an overbearing father who totally dominated his older brothers. As we saw in Chapter Eight, smacked across the face by his father Joseph for failing to execute a dance step the right way, nine-year-old Michael knew just how to hit back. “Hit me again”, he said, “it’ll be the last time I ever sing.”[540”
― Carl Toms, Michael Jackson's Dangerous Liaisons

“most people are in favour of higher taxes on the rich and against running public services and utilities for profit, for example, and trust in key institutions is at an extremely low ebb. But promoting a sense of ‘there is no alternative’ – or so the unofficial slogan of the Establishment goes – has proved a tremendous ideological victory, fostering widespread acceptance and resignation, and sapping a will to resist.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And how they get away with it

“Brett’s mother, Marie Lisbeth, added to the ever-growing picture of mothers around Jackson who struck trial followers as overly star-struck, trusting and uncritically devoted to their idol and benefactor.”
― Carl Toms, Michael Jackson's Dangerous Liaisons

“He recalls sympathetically the words of The Observer after Britain’s disastrous military intervention over the Suez Canal in 1956: ‘We had not realized that our government was capable of such folly and such crookedness.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And how they get away with it