British Journalist Quotes

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

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?

Andrew Neil
Andrew Neil
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
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.

If Bacchus ever had a color he could claim for his own, it should surely be the shade of tannin on drunken lips, of John Keat's 'purple-stained mouth,' or perhaps even of Homer's dangerously wine-dark sea.

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

John Snagge
John Snagge
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.

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.

John Sweeney
John Sweeney
The bourgeois never included the ownership of capital as one of the social restraints that should be abolished, for the simple reason that it was not to him a restraint at all. It never therefore entered his head to regard it as such, and he saw nothing inconsistent in calling for the abolition of privilege, monopoly, and so forth, while hanging on to his capital.

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.

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.

Luke Harding
Luke Harding
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.

The idea that some day another wife would be added to our household was ever present in my mind, but, somehow, when the fact was placed before me in so many unmistakable words, my heart sank within me, and I shrank from the realization that our home was at last to be desecrated by the foul presence of Polygamy.

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.