Simon Jenkins Quotes

• The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment.

  Simon Jenkins

  Jobs, Powerful, Media

  "US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment" by Simon Jenkins, www.theguardian.com. November 28, 2010.

  8 Copy quote

• An Englishman's car is his castle on wheels.

  Simon Jenkins

  America, Car, Castles

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• All students of disaster movies know that nothing survives these natural onslaughts except cats and the highest paid film stars.

  Simon Jenkins

  Stars, Cat, Students

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• I can think of very few science books I've read that I've called useful. What they've been is wonderful. They've actually made me feel that the world around me is a much fuller, much more wonderful, much more awesome place than I ever realized it was. That has been, for me, the wonder of science. That's why science fiction retains its compelling fascination for people. That's why the move of science fiction into biology is so intriguing. I think that science has got a wonderful story to tell.

  Simon Jenkins

  Moving, Book, Thinking

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• The current anger at the march of turbines and pylons across the hills of Britain is not from nimbys. Government money has lubricated most backyard owners to support wind power. It comes from those who appreciate the beauty of the countryside and who question the industrial spoliation of miles of open landscape for a pitiful net gain to climate change.

  Simon Jenkins

  Government, Wind, Appreciate

  "Ecotowns and turbines are a political slap in the face of the landscape" by Simon Jenkins, www.theguardian.com. July 16, 2009.

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• If grownups want to dress in Tudor costume, douse babies in water, intone over the dead and do strange things with wine and wafers, it is a free country. But for a Christian sect to claim ownership of the legal definition of a human relationship is way out of order.

  Simon Jenkins

  Christian, Country, Baby

  "The marriage of church and state is anything but gay" by Simon Jenkins, www.theguardian.com. June 12, 2012.

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• Nowhere in politics is there such a mismatch between public and private realm as in transport. Everyone on the M6 last weekend would have agreed with Transport Minister Alasdair Darling's reported hatred of cars. They too wanted drivers off the roads and on to public transport. Go to it, Mr Darling, they cried in unison, get rid of all those cars. Except, of course, their own. Other people's cars are traffic. My car is the outward essence of my being. It is my hat, stick and cane. It embodies my freedom as a citizen and my right as a democrat. My car is my soul in flight.

  Simon Jenkins

  Weekend, Essence, America

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• Why do Britons keep stabbing each other in August? Why do seaside hotels burn down in August? Why do children disappear in August, examinations get easier and Heathrow become the world's worst airport? The answer lies not in reality but in appearance. News editors abhor a vacuum. Half an hour of airtime and 10 pages of news must be filled each day, whatever the weather.

  Simon Jenkins

  Children, Lying, Reality

  "The state has only aided our seasonal spates of thuggery" by Simon Jenkins, www.theguardian.com. August 21, 2007.

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• The British countryside is threatened by people and interests who really do not care for it

  Simon Jenkins

  Nature, People, Care

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• Without history we are infants. Ask what binds the British Isles more closely to America than to Europe and only history gives a reply. Of all intellectual pursuits, history is the most supremely useful. That is why people crave it and need ever more of it.

  Simon Jenkins

  Europe, America, History

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• The (U.K.) government's thesis that the countryside of upland and coastal Britain is 'worth sacrificing to save the planet' is an insult to science, economics and politics. But the greatest insult is to aesthetics. The trouble is that aesthetics has no way of answering back.

  Simon Jenkins

  Sacrifice, Government, Wind

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• Every generation has its war. I have just been reminded of mine. It ended in 1989, 43 years after it began, the longest war Britain fought and certainly the most expensive. Its climax was total victory. Yet there was no parade, no medals, no colours hung in cathedrals. The Cold War saw no battles and cost almost no blood. Where there is no blood there is no glory and hence no history. Asked What did you do in the war, Daddy?, I could say only that I paid my taxes and left it at that.

  Simon Jenkins

  War, Blood, Years

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