20th-century Broadcaster Quotes

Bruce Dickinson

David Attenborough

Patrick Moore

Kenneth Clark

John Betjeman

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Jeremy Clarkson

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

Humphrey Carpenter

What about the people that couldn't get out?! Someday it's gonna happen to you!... You won't have a car, and you won't have a government airplane, and you won't have a cell phone, and you won't have a weapon!... Blaming the victim...

Friends have suggested that I am the least qualified person to talk about happiness, because I am often down, and sometimes profoundly depressed. But I think that's where my qualification comes from. Because to know happiness, it helps to know unhappiness.

Alastair Campbell

The earth has a mass of 5.97 x 1024 kilograms... a big number and one that really matters because that is all the matter we have got.

If what is called development is allowed to multiply at the present rate, then by the end of the century Great Britain will consist of isolated oases of preserved monuments in a desert of wire, concrete roads, cosy plots and bungalows…Upon this new Britain the Review bestows a name in the hope that it will stick—subtopia.

The game minus slow bowling is like bread without butter or, even worse, French cuisine without the sauces.

You have to be as fully prepared for the dull game as you are for the great game, or else you won't be prepared for the great one.

It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.

He used to be fairly indecisive, but now he's not so certain.

If, sir, I possessed... the power of conveying unlimited sexual attraction through the potency of my voice, I would not be reduced to accepting a miserable pittance from the BBC for interviewing a faded female in a damp basement.

Gilbert Harding

If we could just get people to be nice to their babies for five years straight, that would be it for war, drug abuse, addiction, promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases,... Almost all would be completely eliminated, because they all arise from dysfunctional early childhood experiences, which are all run by women

Stefan Molyneux

I'm proud to say I've made a career out of being trivial. I think it's an art form.

Janet Street-Porter

[Sir James Goldsmith] has got nothing to be smug about, and I would like to say that 1,500 votes is a derisory total. We have shown tonight that the Referendum Party is dead in the water, and Sir James can get off back to Mexico knowing your attempt to buy the British political system has failed.

I want the program to be very open and develop in style as time goes on. But I am also interested in the positive aspects of Asian family life and other Asian qualities, although overall, my style is very informal.

I am only too aware that I am open to Rees's Second Law of Quotation: "However sure you are that you have attributed a quotation correctly, an earlier source will be pointed out to you."

On his knowledge of popular music:

I'm blessed with total recall, except about where I left my umbrella.

He smiled rather too much. He smiled at breakfast, you know.

Charles Wheeler (journalist)

Everything in life, I have come to conclude, is about 15 minutes too long. Except for summer - summer never begins early enough and always ends too soon.

Peter John Gzowski

All popular radio is based on repetition and familiarity. It's almost that the listener knows what you're going to say before you say it... If you did it for long enough, you wouldn't have to say anything at all.

English took time to emerge as the common tongue. There had been luck, but also cunning and the beginnings of what was to become English's most subtle and ruthless characteristic of all: its capacity to absorb others.

People have accused me of being so far up Tiger's arse that he can barely make a full swing, but I maintain that he is a special person.

Ask any Ferrari, Porsche or Ray-Ban salesperson about their average customer and you will very likely hear that he is not, as the adverts would have us believe, a virile young footballer with shiny hair, a rippling six pack and a trouser pouch like a new punch bag. He is, in fact, a middle-aged bloke wearing more chins than he started life with and carrying the clear evidence of forty years of beer and pies slung across his midriff.

Richard Hammond

Hello Americans, I'm Paul Harvey. You know what the news is — in a minute, you're going to hear the rest of the story.

The internet's perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain't one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional live audience quickly conspire to create a perfect storm of perpetual bickering.

Charlie Brooker

What we attempt to do is not without danger. What we attempt to do may not succeed. But it is right and it is just. We act for the good of all.