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David Aaronovitch
7 quotes
“This piece starts inside a taxi parked near the Mumtaz restaurant in Baker Street, one evening in the early Seventies. There are five people inside, and one of them, a middle-aged celebrity, looks over to a 16-year-old boy sitting opposite, rolls his famous eyes, and says, "I think Big John has the hots for somebody here, and my guess," he pauses, and then points, "is that it's you." The "you" was me.”
David Aaronovitch (born 1954) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Don't look now", The Observer (19 January 2003).
“But, [[John Pilger|[John] Pilger]] objected, "Amnesty produced a catalogue of Saddam's killings that amounted mostly to hundreds every year, not millions. It is an appaling record that does not require the exaggeration of state-inspired propaganda". In fact Pilger's own source said (unquoted by him) that, in addition to the number of known executions Amnesty had also collected information on around 17,000 cases of disappearances, over the last 20 years, and "the real figure may be much higher".”
David Aaronovitch (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“During the Anfal anti-Kurdish campaign in 1987 as many as 180,000 Kurds disappeared. At Halabja, in one incident alone, more people were killed than in the whole of this latest Gulf war. The most conservative death toll attached to the repression of the Shia uprising in 1991 was 30,000. One million died in the Iran-Iraq war started by Saddam. And this is reduced by Pilger to "hundreds every year".”
David Aaronovitch (born 1954) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lies and the Left", The Observer (27 April 2003), p. 29
“[On his mother] She was disapproving when I grew my hair long and even more disapproving when, a few years later, I cut it again. I had, in a sense, let my own hair down.”
David Aaronovitch (born 1954) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Extract from Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists, London: Jonathan Cape (2016), as cited by Rachel Cooke in "David Aaronovitch: Me, Mum, Dad… and Stalin", The Observer (10 January 2016).
“The left's vice has always been self-righteousness, just as the right's is smugness. But when you add the sense of entitlement that is characteristic of so many of the younger middle-class people in Britain, you can end up with an impatience with compromise coupled to a belief that anything that is strongly felt must somehow be enacted.”
David Aaronovitch (born 1954) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Corbynites are more like schoolkids than Trots", The Times (25 August 2016).
“For health publications to eschew using the word "women" in relation to the need for cervical smears, substituting the phrase "people with cervixes" seemed not just awkward but damaging. Some women, for example, might not even know they had cervixes. Why would a transwoman feel her existence was denied by health authorities recognising that people with cervixes were, to a statistical vanishing point, women?”
David Aaronovitch (born 1954) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Trans by Helen Joyce review — Women exist! The facts of biology trump ideology", The Times (16 July 2021).
“When the discussion gets under way, a number of things become apparent. The first is that the people here are mostly very bright, very well-informed and anything but swivel-eyed saddos. The second is that sci-fi and fantasy are not, as I'd imagined, boys-only territories. Half the people attending are women, and mostly feminists at that. Perhaps because the creation of alternative worlds allows imaginary spaces in which sexism and male awfulness simply do not exist. (In the afternoon I was part of a small otherwise all-female audience for two women librarians discussing censorship in children's sci-fi. I learnt a lot.) More than anything these people — men and women — seemed to want to be writers. They had a detailed appreciation of plotting and characterisation, and seemed to seek advice about their own projects whenever they could.”
David Aaronovitch (born 1954) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: My brother the sci fi fanatic", The Times (5 March 2011).