Top 108 Quotes & Sayings by Owen Jones
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British journalist Owen Jones.
Last updated on November 8, 2024.
The age of mass politics is one that demands radical solutions rather than tinkering.
A desire for social connection is fundamentally hardwired into our psychology, and so being deprived of it has devastating mental and physical consequences. Yet we live in a society which has become ever more fragmented and atomised.
Donald Trump's mini-me, Boris Johnson, is in the ascendant: the Tory crown is his to lose. But his colleagues know he's an incompetent, a man who cares only for himself, who was fired twice - by a newspaper editor and a party leader - over allegations of dishonesty.
We should all expect to be able to die with comfort, dignity and love. Our society does not lack the wealth to realise this aspiration, but the willpower.
Everyone is entitled to change their mind when the facts do.
The passenger pigeon, the golden toad, the Caspian tiger: they are all gone, and other species hang by a thread. Our actions are not merely driving other species to extinction: we threaten our own survival, too, by destabilising ecosystems and destroying biodiversity.
The left's mission isn't simply to grant every citizen the basic means of survival, but comfort and prosperity, too, through collective means. Yet the existence of billionaires is irreconcilable with this emancipatory project.
A society should be judged by how it treats its children. A country that fails to invest in its children is imperilling its future.
What do we value more: an economic system which privileges profit above all other considerations, or the continued existence of human civilisation as we recognise it? A reckoning is coming.
In the neoliberal era, rolling back the state has in practice meant withdrawing state support and social security for the majority, but continuing vast subsidies for vested interests.
If sharp-elbowed parents are no longer able to buy themselves out of state education, they are incentivised to improve their local schools.
A flourishing higher education sector is critical to a nation's economy and culture.
But surely no company is going to launch an advertising campaign if it thinks it will lose money; therefore, by definition, any social justice-orientated marketing is driven primarily by money, not advancing the cause of human progress.
Although economic grievances were critical in delivering the referendum result, Brexit has fomented an all-out culture war.
A flourishing, diverse media is essential to a functioning democracy.
Being on the left is supposed to be about unbounded optimism, a belief that what is deemed politically impossible by the 'sensible grownups' of politics can be realised, with sufficient imagination and determination.
Capitalism has proved its ability to adapt: at a time when so many younger people quite legitimately feel that the economic system doesn't work for them, big business appealing to their sense of idealism is a savvy move.
For the well-heeled elites, the 90s and 00s were a non-stop party with no hangover: even after the financial crash, the fortunes of Britain's 1,000 richest families more than doubled.
From a genuine living wage to a mass housebuilding programme and strong workers' and trade unions rights preventing a race to the bottom, our answers to the grievances that help drive anti-immigrant sentiment must be front and centre.
The 'free market' is a creed that stirs up near religious devotion among its believers. It is in fact a con, a myth, a great deception.
Philanthropists decide how to spend their money based on their own personal whims, rather than what is best for the social good.
We are unlikely to spend our last moments regretting that we didn't spend enough of our lives chained to a desk. We may instead find ourselves rueing the time we didn't spend watching our children grow, or with our loved ones, or travelling, or on the cultural or leisure pursuits that bring us happiness.
Humans should be the Earth's custodians, not its butchers. Much attention - though not enough - focuses on the existential threat posed by climate change. But humanity's mass destruction of the Earth's wildlife is all too little discussed.
Private schools do confer other advantages, of course: whether it be networks, or a sense of confidence that can shade into a poisonous sense of social superiority.
From a very young age, boys are taught that real men get into fights, say demeaning things about girls and women, show extraordinary athletic prowess, avoid looking studious, don't do anything to display supposed emotional 'weakness' and prioritise competition over cooperation.
Few would deny the importance of tackling online hatred or child abuse content. The internet, after all, has become a key weapon for those who disseminate and incite hatred and violence against minorities, and for those who pose a horrifying threat to children.
The existence of billionaires should sound an alarm: they are the most extreme manifestation of wealth generated by the efforts of millions of people being funnelled into the pockets of a tiny few.
Jobs have become more precarious and staff turnover has increased while union membership has plummeted, weakening workplace solidarity.
In the 00s, it was often claimed that political apathy had replaced political participation. Membership of political parties and electoral turnout were both said to be in irreversible decline.
Britain in 2018 has the feel of a Netflix drama approaching its season finale. It's the classic 'how on earth does anyone get out of this one?' kind of cliffhanger, with all of the key protagonists confronted by their nemesis.
It is easier to diagnose a crisis than to cure it, of course.
Nonbelievers may welcome the collapse in British religiosity, but the decline in church attendance has meant that the chance to chat each week with other people has vanished.
When those with wealth and power fear that their privilege is even mildly challenged, they invariably clothe themselves in the garbs of victimhood.
Britain's end-of-life and palliative care services are a national travesty. That a public debate on this crisis is so sorely lacking has much to do with our fear of confronting dying and death.
Loneliness is devastating our mental and physical health and, at its worst, is killing us. Yet thankfully, unlike some conditions, we can easily cure it. We just need the will.
We need to organise unapologetically anti-racist campaigns in our communities, ones that emphasise the fact that the blame for social ills lies with the powerful.
If you are dim but have rich parents, a life of comfort, affluence and power is almost inevitable - while the bright but poor are systematically robbed of their potential.
Poverty damages the educational potential of children, whether through stress or poor diet, while overcrowded, poor-quality housing has the same impact too.
Political reporting is too often trivialised, treated as a soap opera based in Westminster, rather than placed in a broader social or economic context.
For years, media moguls and campaigns bankrolled by the rich have fed the lie that migrants are the cause of injustices propagated by the powerful: the failure to build housing, the strain on public services by cuts, the lack of secure jobs, the decline in real wages.
David Cameron set impossible targets and relentlessly portrayed immigration as a social burden while pursuing an economic strategy that suppressed wages. It did not end well for him, nor, more importantly, for the country.
Austerity and economic insecurity have collided with the scapegoating of migrants and refugees, at a time when global instability and warfare have driven millions to flee violence and persecution, a minority of whom have arrived on European shores to be met with hostility.
Opposition to immigration is an emotional argument, and human beings are emotional, not robots powered by data.
In a society rigged in favour of landlords over tenants, to rent privately is to be deprived of security.
Freedom of movement in Europe has been all but abandoned as a cause in British politics. Brexit was far more about freedom of movement than our exact trading relationship with the EU, and the electorate rejected it.
Tuition fees have formed part of a full-frontal assault on the living standards of a generation battered by a housing crisis, stagnating wages and slashed services.
As inspirationally tireless as hospice fundraisers are, these are services that desperately need sustainable central funding. This means addressing the social care crisis too, which has inevitable knock-on effects on palliative and end-of-life services.
After the rise of Thatcherism, the smashing of the trade unions, and the post-cold war sense that any alternative to free-market capitalism was permanently discredited, you can see why the wealthy felt drunk on the sense of eternal victory.
All I want for 2019 is for much-loved pop stars to stop being inadvertent propagandists for mass-murdering dictatorships.
Turkey is a warning: democracy is precious but fragile. It underlines how rights and freedoms are often won at great cost and sacrifice but can be stripped away by regimes exploiting national crises.
Because so many employers refuse to pay their workers a wage on which they can live - most Britons languishing below the poverty line are in work - the state has to spend billions of pounds a year on in-work benefits.
Brands are increasingly flirting with the realm of politics.
The market fundamentalist ideology that dominates much of the west has attempted to indoctrinate us with a simple myth: that we all rise or fall according to our individual efforts alone; that billionaires amass vast amounts of wealth because they are entrepreneurial, plucky, go-getting geniuses.
Thousands do benefit from love, support and comfort in their final chapter: I watched my dad slip away without pain as Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen tracks played in a warm Marie Curie hospice, surrounded by doting nurses and his family.
Modern capitalism is based on a myth: that thriving private entrepreneurs generate wealth through their own hard work, innovation and get-up-and-go.
In the 1920s prohibition in the US notoriously failed to tackle alcohol use, led to lethal forms of liquor entering the black market, fuelled organised crime and its associated violence, and wasted public money.
Here in Britain, black people are disproportionately targeted, arrested and imprisoned for drug offences, while organised and violent crime are granted a massive source of revenue.
Yet we have learned from the Scottish independence vote and with Brexit what referendums do to our politics. They foster bitter divisions in ways that parliamentary elections tend not to do.
University should foster imagination and creativity, enriching society in the process.
The vast majority of people back higher taxes on the rich. Yet these are fringe ideas within most of the mainstream media, which marginalises those who support them.
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