British Journalist Quotes

Finding common ground between science and magic depends, of course, on how we define magic.

Roger Highfield
Roger Highfield
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.

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.

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.

Think of it! A few more boats, a few more planks of wood nailed together in a particular way at a thrifty cost and all those men and women whom the world can so ill afford to loose would be with us today. There would be no mourning in thousands of homes which now are desolate and these words need not have been written.

Lawrence Beesley
Lawrence Beesley
Why should the universe be constructed in such a way that atoms acquire the ability to be curious about themselves.

The genealogy of scientific discovery is important because every scientist inherits so much from his predecessors. Science is evolutionary, depending upon the intermarriage of ideas. The family tree of a major scientific discovery is usually more impressively international than that of the most august royal house.

It was a testament to the resilience of humanity. Give a man a tree and he will make it into a boat; give him a leaf and he will curve it into a cup and drink water from it; give him a rock and he will make a weapon to protect himself and his family. Give a man a small box and a limit of 140 characters to type into it, and he will adapt it to fight an oppressive dictatorship in the Middle East.

Accuracy first, I used to tell the writers. We must never lie by accident, or through slovenliness, only deliberately!

The more a climate can be created in which neither the English nor the Scots are given cause to resent each other, the better.

Each veil lifted revealed a multitude of others. They perceived a chain of interlocking and interdependent mysteries, the meteorological equivalent of DNA and the double helix.

The core values that underpin sustainable development - interdependence, empathy, equity, personal responsibility and intergenerational justice - are the only foundation upon which any viable vision of a better world can possibly be constructed

Jonathon Porritt
Jonathon Porritt
Journalism has become a sort of competitive screeching: what is trivial but noisy and immediate takes precedence over important matters that develop over time.

Ted Koppel
Ted Koppel
It used to irritate a friend of mine that when he went to confession he never got the chance to tell the priest the good things he had done.

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

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

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

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.

There can be no more intimate and elemental part of the individual than his or her own consciousness. At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are - to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either.

Graham Hancock
Graham Hancock
A gardener's life is full of sweets and sours; He gets the sunshine when he needs the showers.

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.