English Journalist Quotes

George Orwell

Daniel Defoe

George Eliot

Edward Said

William Cobbett

E. H. Carr

David Frost

The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men

Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

Anthony Burgess

He who reflects on the number of lives that have been sacrificed to sustain his own, should enquire by what the account has been balanced, and whether his life is become proportionately of more value by the exercise of virtue and by the superior happiness which he has communicated to [more] reasonable beings.

John Hawkesworth

The hedgerows are set with the crystals of winter, And ripe berries hiding from gay-feathered thieves ; The hand of December, the vigorous tinter, Has browned and encarmined the exquisite leaves.

George Robert Sims

The underlying purpose of all art is to create patterns of imagery which somehow convey a sense of life set in a framework of order... all great art... harmonises consciousness with the ego-transcending Self.

Christopher Booker

Archaeology is too often considered to be the pursuit of weak-chested youths and eccentric old men; it is seldom regarded as a possible vocation for normal persons of sound health and balanced mind.

We hope that Wisden is a constant, helping the reader to make sense of it all and providing a little contemplative calm.

DEAL is a most villainous place. It is full of filthy-looking people.Great desolationof abomination has beengoing on here.

William Cobbett

The sheer violence of it, the howl of air raid sirens and the air-cutting fall of the missiles carried its own political message; not just to President Saddam but to the rest of the world. We are the superpower, those explosions said last night. This is how we do business.

I am not angry. I am just disappointed that, once again, a hotel has tried to convince me it will move heaven and earth to ensure I am comfortable when, in reality, it won't even pass me the coffee pot!

If your opponent imagines that because you are a woman you're easy to bluff, that you'd never bluff yourself and that you can be pushed around, you can exploit those assumptions.

As a journalist, my job is to be dispassionate. Suddenly to be the centre of a story and to be crying, it made me feel very insecure.

Natasha Kaplinsky

Los Angeles had no culture of its own, just a large collection of misreadings of the artistic histories of other, proper cities.

I don't want to sound like I'm bragging but I think I've finally managed to play the record at the right speed.

Cricket is the most senior, widespread and deeply rooted of English games.

The point is that the techniques are pretty much the same in fiction and nonfiction.

In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Bond didn't defend the practice. He simply maintained that the more effort and ingenuity you put into gambling, the more you took out.

Out in the Pool certain other boats caught the eye... each carried a bright fire amidships, in a brazier, beside a man, two small barrels of beer, and a very large handbell. The men were purlmen, Grandfather Nat told me, selling hot beer in the cold mornings - to the men on the colliers, or on any other craft thereabout.

Arthur Morrison

To a prison visitor who asked if he were sewing:

Horatio Bottomley

Nothing excites jaded Grandmasters more than a theoretical novelty

No one knows how ungentlemanly he can look, until he has seen himself in a shocking bad hat.

Robert Smith Surtees

Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them.

Anthony Daniels

Though I don't like the crew, I won't sink the ship. In fact, in time of storm I'll do my best to save it. You see, we are all in this craft and must sink or swim together.