James Buchan quotes - page 2

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support. (James Buchan)
We generally write best of what we ourselves have seen. View quote
James Buchan
For 50 years, nuclear power stations have produced three products which only a lunatic could want: bomb-explosive plutonium, lethal radioactive waste and electricity so dear it has to be heavily subsidised. They leave to future generations the task, and most of the cost, of making safe sites that have been polluted half-way to eternity. View quote
James Buchan
Any new financial order for the world must tackle the three chief challenges of our age. View quote
James Buchan
Governments of rich countries spend some $6bn of tax money a year on disaster relief and development aid overseas, while each new earthquake, famine or tidal wave can attract 1,000 aid organisations, from the United Nations Children's Fund and Oxfam to the 'Jesus Brigades' of the American south and other charitable adventurers. View quote
James Buchan
For all their current prestige, Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers are still regarded in all but the most desperate districts of Gaza or Peshawar as romantics with little chance of more than symbolic victories, however bloody and brutal. That gives both the Middle East and the West a small and distant hope of security. View quote
James Buchan
To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century. View quote
James Buchan
Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader. View quote
James Buchan
If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside. View quote
James Buchan
Europe and North America, we are told, are less dependent on energy-intensive heavy industry than in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we squeeze more GDP out of a barrel of oil than in those benighted days. View quote
James Buchan
Viewed from a distance, or through the eye of the All-Knowing CEO of the Universe, the crash of 2008 followed the usual pattern. A long-lived boom driven by cheap credit, going back as far as 1982 (though subject to interruptions in the mid-1980s and 1990s, and in 2001), came to grief because of a rise in the cost of borrowing money. (James Buchan)
By pouring money and goods into devastated regions, foreign aid workers sometimes compound the disruption and debauch the survivors. View quote
James Buchan
When Gordon the Brown, in London in 1997, commissioned a great inquisition or survey of his new realm, the result was the so-called national asset register, which was immediately dubbed by the boomers of the UK Treasury 'the modern Domesday Book.' View quote
James Buchan
Were there peace and justice in the Middle East, the Arabs would no more need their tinhorn dictators than they would their corpulent princes. View quote
James Buchan
Soaring prices for crude oil, falling production surpluses, wild speculation in commodities, a rush into the precious metals, turmoil in the Middle East, assertive oil producers: it is 1973-74 all over again, and at dictation speed. View quote
James Buchan
The world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation. View quote
James Buchan
Whatever else it was, Adolf Hitler's short-lived regime was also a colossal industrial process by which the wealth and productive power of much of Europe was wrenched from its normal purposes and converted into a machine for killing. View quote
James Buchan
The dividing line between wish and need was never clear. View quote
James Buchan
Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history; and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing. View quote
James Buchan
Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka. View quote
James Buchan
Because bankers measure their self-worth in money, and pay themselves a lot of it, they think they're fine fellows and don't need to explain themselves. (James Buchan)
Losing your capital is like losing your trousers. It is a real humiliation, and one not to be soon repeated. View quote
James Buchan
What holds an Arab leader in power is a mixture of violence and prestige. Both President Assad and King Hussein were felt to have defended Arab interests against the world. That, in the end, is more important than what they wear on their head. View quote
James Buchan
One of the consequences of the Iranian revolution has been an explosion of history. A country once known only from British consular reports and intrepid travelogues is now awash with historical documents, letters, diaries, grainy video, weblogs and secret police files of questionable authenticity. View quote
James Buchan
Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice. View quote
James Buchan

James Buchan

Occupation: British Novelist
Born: June 11, 1954
Quotes count: 51