British Journalist Quotes

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

Howard Jacobson

He was exceptionally aggressive. He said I would do anything to get on television. That's rubbish. The fact is that out of the 10 tasks we were given to do in the series I was on the winning side eight times.

There is no state more abject than the man broken on the waterboarding rack, or frozen to near death, or forced to stand for days on end, or hooded and strapped to shackles in a ceiling, or having his legs pulpified by repeated beating, or forced to eat pork and drink alcohol against religious strictures. Everything I have just described has been done by US forces under the command and direction of George W. Bush. They are all acts of absolute tyranny, conducted by people who at that moment are absolute tyrants.

Andrew Sullivan

A cat actually thinks visibly. If you watch him jump on a shelf, the wish to jump and the action of jumping are one and the same thing... It's in exactly the same way that all Brook's exercises try to train the actor. The actor is trained to become so organically related within himself, he thinks completely with his body. He becomes one sensitive, responding whole... The whole of him is one.

He had by now divested himself of schoolboy attitudes. He was unburdened by the desire to be a martyr or a hero. Any thoughts in that direction, Belgica effectively had quashed. Heroism in the corrupt sense of the age almost by definition, meant wanton self-sacrifice and bungling. For neither had he any taste. He wanted rational attainment; victory, but not at any price. No point upon the globe was worth the cost of a single life.

Roland Huntford

Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?

I can't see who's in the lead but it's either Oxford or Cambridge.

Commentary on the 1949 Boat Race

It will all go on as long as women are stupid enough to go on bringing men into the world...

Dorothy Richardson

Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you'd be okay.

XR, as Extinction Rebellion's members call it, uses nonviolent mass disruption to increase awareness of climate change and force action on the issue, such as persuading governments to declare a climate emergency and to set targets for net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025.

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

Truth travels slowly and gets weaker as it goes. Suitable lies are strong and run faster.

Im still very skeptical about the whole thing. The Laboratory (Châtenay-Malabry) is unscrupulous to say the least, because they shouldn't know the sample they're testing. The fact that the lab knew whose sample it was testing is just one of the anomolies It's time for the second test, the so-called B sample, be done in a second country by a second lab. I'm not saying the lab is a crooked lab, they have proved to us that they're not a particularly scrupulous lab. I got a feeling he's not telling lies.

The winner is not the player who wins the most pots. The winner is the player who wins the most money.

Never get so fascinated by the extraordinary that you miss the ordinary.

Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!

There is no truer saying than "Revenge is a dish best eaten cold." It is so much sweeter for the waiting, and my only regret is that I cannot broadcast my triumph to the world.

Minette Walters

It is generally admitted, and very frequently proved, that virtue and genius, and all the natural good qualities which men possess, are derived from their mothers.

With books at least, the best experiences are not when you find what you were looking for, but when something quite different finds you, takes you by surprise, shifts your tastes to new territory.

But at least if you hint and are rejected, the rejection is blurable rather than blistering. Whereas if you ask outright and are refused, the humiliation is as stark as a streaker on a football.

In practice, the ocean is the world's wildest place because of both its fearsome natural danger and how easy it is out there to slip from the boundaries of law and civilization that seem so firm ashore.

I had never 'taken a cutting' before... Do you realize that the whole thing is miraculous? It is exactly as though you were to cut off your wife's leg, stick it in the lawn, and be greeted on the following day by an entirely new woman, sprung from the leg, advancing across the lawn to meet you.

Beverley Nichols

For the big-mouthed racist right, theirs is a rebellion in favour of order. For them, as in the 1930s, all variations – of gender, race or sexuality – have to be interpreted as the strong versus the weak. They love the theatre of the mass rally, where the charismatic leader – the magic helper, as Fromm called him – can browbeat them so hard with illogic, that when experts confront them with the facts it does not matter.

Paul Mason (journalist)

An astrologer is an artist, an astronomer is not; in fact, an astronomer is a mere... drudge, a dry, unpoetical, soulless calculator.

James Elishama Smith

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.

Melanie Phillips