British Journalist Quotes

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

Francis Burnand

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.

Management that wants to change an institution must first show it loves that institution.

Our establishment has presided over economic decline and bequeathed a culture of mediocrity. Why join a bunch of losers?

The word patriotism, or its equivalents and derivations, is upon everyone's lips at the present time. It is a magic word which is thought by most people to cover any multitude of sins. To be patriotic in whatever cause is tantamount to being virtuous, while no worse charge can be brought against a man in popular estimation than to say he is unpatriotic.

Ernest Belfort Bax

The true role of science is not to change the universe but more fully to appreciate it.

Americans are rather like bad Bulgarian wine: they don't travel well.

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

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.

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

Commentary on the 1949 Boat Race

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.

There is a story that when Mrs Thatcher first met Gorbachev he gave her a ball-point and she offered him Labour-voting Scotland.

Nicholas Shakespeare

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.

I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it, it makes me cringe.

In some remote regions of Islam it is said, a woman caught unveiled by a stranger will raise her skirt to cover her face.

Raymond Mortimer

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.

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

As I was saying when I was interrupted, it is a powerful hard thing to please all the people all the time.

The night is your friend. The V is your sign.

Douglas Ritchie

Sloane minds are undeveloped but intuitive, wild places where they go out to bag an idea or see how things are going. They do not like theory, unless it produces a joke.

Paradoxically, in its quest to make Americans more secure, the NSA has made American communications less secure; it has undermined the safety of the entire internet.

The people who lived behind those clean lace curtains in row after row of identical boxes were newspaper readers, and every word in at any rate my newspaper must be clear and comprehensible to them, must be interesting to them, must encourage them to break away from littleness, stimulate their ambition, help them to want to build a better land.

Arthur Christiansen

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

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.

The ultimate sophistication of subversion is to take over the government, not by unlawful but by lawful means.