Ian Hislop Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

In Britian we have a free press. It's not a pretty press, but it's free. The people who can't bear the Daily Mail, they say: 'you should ban it'. No no, no no, you don't ban it... you don't buy it.

Ian Hislop
The trouble about working on a tabloid is that they tend to be run by bullies.

Ian Hislop
I do have a residual belief that, if at all possible, you should try not to mock the weak

Ian Hislop
Boris Johnson, people always ask me the same question, they say, 'Is Boris a very very clever man pretending to be an idiot?' And I always say, 'No.'

Ian Hislop
For fifty years Private Eye has pretty much in most issues exposed a miscarriage of justice, and a lot of them have been murders. Over the years, large numbers of these cases have been found to be entirely wrong, and the men convicted — almost always men, there was a couple of women — have been found innocent, so we would have killed those people, and in some of those very high profile cases which involved terrorism cases, we would have made very dangerous new martyrs by executing people who turned out not to have committed the murders involved. So on a purely practical basis, whatever you think it says about the civilised nature of your society or not, I think it would be incredibly dangerous to have capital punishment back.

Ian Hislop
It's the gap between how they think they are coming over and how they actually come over. In their case, it's the gulf between their self-perception and the reality. The job of a satirist is to point it out.

Ian Hislop
Modest about our national pride—and inordinately proud of our national modesty.

Ian Hislop