British Journalist Quotes

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

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

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

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.

Cats do not keep the mice away; it is my belief that they preserve them for the chase.

We simultaneously disdain and covet American culture, condemning it as junk food, even as we reach for another helping – a kind of binge-and-puke social bulimia.

Jonathan Freedland
Jonathan Freedland
Look in my face. My name is Used-to-was;
I am also called Played-out and Done-to-death,
And It-will-wash-no-more.

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.

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.

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

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.

Powerful men often succeed through the help of their wives. Powerful women only succeed in spite of their husbands.

Trotsky's writings and those of his followers were freely published in the middle and late thirties by the Hearst Press in America. His works on his "new kind of Communism" were published by the Franco Press at Salamanca and Burgos. The secret police of the Polish dictatorship were specially educated in Trotskyism in order to facilitate their work of espionage and disruption inside the Polish working-class movement.

The only redemptive feature of war is the brotherhood which it forges.

Max Hastings
Max Hastings
I boast of being the only man in London who has been bombed off a lavatory seat while reading Jane Austen. She went into the bath; I went through the door.

To be conservative requires no brains whatsoever. Cabbages, cows and conifers are conservatives, and are so stupid they don't even know it. All that is basically required is acceptance of what exists.

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.

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

Even if I do not see the fruits, the struggle has been worthwhile. If my life has taught me anything, it is that one must fight.

According to legend, Telford is so dull that the bypass was built before the town.
On the Midlands new-town

Most people think I have a lot of fun and that I'm a pretty good driver but they don't take my driving all that seriously.

James Hunt
James Hunt
Experience has taught that politics is a game played by conmen and hypocrites.

English people are famous for never speaking out but only saying what they really feel about you behind your back. Americans believe the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I like exploring those, er, differences in national snippiness.

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
Minette Walters