British Journalist Quotes

Wilkie Collins

Edgar Wallace

Kim Philby

Edwin Arnold

Amelia Edwards

James Hunt

Malcolm Gladwell

Muddle is the extra unknown personality in any committee.

Anthony Sampson

Journalists belong in the gutter because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.

Gerald Priestland

Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilized folk to despise war.

The past has too much knowledge embedded in it, and therefore it's best to forget it and start anew.

Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes, Or any searcher know by mortal mind; Veil upon veil will lift but there must be Veil upon veil behind.

Nature is not horrible. Nature is not wonderful. Nature is not cruel. Nature is not beautiful. Nature only is.

I'd very much like to wake up one morning with a cow of the Friesian variety and walk her down to Soho to the Coach and Horses, stopping on the way to buy twenty Players, ply her with vodkas until closing time, whip her off to an Indian restaurant, take her up to the Colony Room till 5.30 and then to the Yorkminster, Swiss Tavern, Three Greyhounds, get beaten up by Chinese waiters at midnight, have a row with the taxi driver, set the bed on fire, put it out with tears and then wake up on the floor. Could you then milk said cow? I doubt it.

Jeffrey Bernard

Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

It 's no matter what you do
If your heart be only true,
And his heart was true to Poll.

Francis Burnand

When astronomers express dissatisfaction with both the Big Bang and the Steady State concepts of the universe, they are in trouble, because it is hard to imagine radical alternatives.

The test of a good classical moralization is that it seems to have been written for oneself alone.

James Cameron (journalist)

Shallow uniformity is not an accident but a consequence of what Marxists optimistically call late capitalism.

The citron or spicy grove for me would never yield A perfume half so grateful as the lilies of the field.

Methods Used
1. Marxist: You decide you're the vanguard of the proletariat and then you can do whatever you want because history will back you up.
2. Stoic: Stay very calm.
3. Positivist: Yes, I'm positive I want to rob this bank.

Only the working masses can change society; but they will not do that spontaneously, on their own. They can rock capitalism back onto its heels but they will only knock it out if they have the organisation, the socialist party, which can show the way to a new, socialist order of society. Such a party does not just emerge. It can only be built out of the day-today struggles of working people.

As a Macedonian [Philip] was looked down upon by the more refined Athenians, but they shared the same Hellenistic culture. How deep this went is evident in aesthetically the least spectacular, but politically the most explosive, of the finds in Vergina. In the Great Tumulus above Philip's tombs, which was raised by the invading Galatians in 274 BC, the archaeologists found fragments of no fewer than seventy-five funeral monuments, or stelai. The names on these were entirely Greek, save two which appeared to be Hellenised versions of Thracian and Phoenician names. The implication is that Philip's Macedonia was thoroughly Hellenised, an outpost of classical Greek culture.

It saddens me that the game has sold its soul to television. What we see now is a televisual game, and it cannot bear the weight of its publicity.

Brian has compared presenting The World at One to high diving into an empty pool, and hoping it will be filled before you reach the bottom.

The climate-change deniers are rapidly ending up with as much intellectual credibility as creationists and Flat Earthers... They are denying the reality of a force that — unless we change the way we live pretty fast — will kill millions.

It is, I reckon, difficult to conceive of a single area of government policy that is at once so important for each of us, so catastrophically complicated, so insanely unjust, so obscenely ineffective, and has been quite so comprehensively cocked up by successive administratations as the British pension system.

Don't you dare call me optimistic. (It's a) grave insult.

When we give our minds and our responsibility away, we give our lives away. If enough of us do it, we give the world away and that is precisely what we have been doing throughout known human history. This is why the few have always controlled the masses.

And have no doubt, the real purpose of the Earth Summit is to transfer your hard-earned cash to others who mostly have governments with even less of a clue how to conduct their affairs than we do.

The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they're chocolates and it matters which they select.

Howard Jacobson

It is one of the many ironies of this period that, at a time when the intelligentsia were excoriating Mellon for tax-evasion, and contrasting the smooth-running Soviet planned economy with the breakdown in America, he was secretly exploiting the frantic necessities of the Soviet leaders to form the basis of one of America's most splendid public collections