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.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Richard Holt Hutton

Most Arabs and Muslims feel that the United States hasn't really been paying much attention to their desires. They think it has been pursuing its policies for its own sake and not according to many of the principles that it claims are its own - democracy, self-determination, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, international law.

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

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

Muscle has memory: the body knows things the mind will not admit.

Nothing excites jaded Grandmasters more than a theoretical novelty

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

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!

You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do.

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.

Next to the pleasure of reading a favourite fishing book comes that of persuading a friend to read it too.

To a prison visitor who asked if he were sewing:

Horatio Bottomley

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

How long can a coincidence extend before it ceases to be one? Does coincidence have to be momentary? How long is the moment, the ongoing moment?

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.

This is Soho, where anything goes, just make sure it's not your wallet.

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

One non-revolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of permanent revolution.

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.

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.