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

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

To reform the House of Lords [in 1910] meant to set down in writing a Constitution which for centuries had remained happily unwritten, to conjure a great ghost into the narrow and corruptible flesh of a code.

The way we understand both our present and our future depends on what we have lived through.

Xue Xinran
Xue Xinran
Beyond are greens where pink chestnuts, may trees and copper beeches flaunt themselves gaily.

Why should people be expected to think about the meaning of life merely because they happen to be ill? That is just the time when there is no time to think about such things, because the body is so greedy for attention.

Love is not an option. It's the choice of an idiot who wants to end with nothing, robbed and abused and humiliated.

Her uncle drove a taxi which he had purchased on the 'never never' system. You pay $80 down and more than you can afford for the rest of your life.

Edgar Wallace
Edgar Wallace
In response as to why he avoided getting to know Members of Parliament:
If I knew them, it might spoil the purity of my hatred.

A newspaper, conducted on the true and natural principles of such a publication, ought to be the register of the times, and faithful recorder of every species of intelligence; it ought not to be engrossed by any particular object; but, like a well covered table, it should contain something suited to every palate.

You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.

John Lanchester
John Lanchester
O tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?

The anger came creeping back like the leak from a dripping water tank, the fall of each individual drop passing almost unnoticed until I realized I was soaked with the emotion.

Let's face it, there are no plain women on television.

The most difficult task for anyone wandering through a foreign land with the hope of gaining some insight into it is the profound need to come to terms with the lives and thoughts of strangers.

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.

Mental time-travel is one of the greatest gifts of the mind. It makes us human, and it makes us special.

Claudia Hammond
Claudia Hammond
Whereas fanatic is usually a pejorative word, a Fan is someone who has roots somewhere.

Since science is essentially objective, involving the study of how things actually are, "materialism" would therefore seem to be its antithesis, since its starting point is the desire to impose upon the natural world a particular and limited way of looking at it.

The Devil himself had probably redesigned Hell in the light of information he had gained from observing airport layouts.

The morning stars sang together. And a person of delicate ear and nice judgment discussed the singing at length, and showed how and wherein one star differed from another, and which was great and which was not. And still the morning stars sang together.

I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of 'living a lie'. I came to believe that other people - even when you think you know them well - are ultimately unknowable.

The mighty steam-engine has its germ in the simple boiler in which the peasant prepares his food. The huge ship is but the expansion of the floating leaf freighted with its cargo of atmospheric dust; and the flying balloon is but the infant's soap-bubble lightly laden and overgrown. But the Telescope, even in its most elementary form, embodies a novel and gigantic idea, without an analogue in nature, and without a prototype in experience

If your lawyers tell you that you have a very good case, you should settle immediately.