James Buchan Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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.

  James Buchan

  Couple, Love You, People

  "The women come and go". www.theguardian.com. July 2, 2004.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Buchan

  Class, Devil, Today

  "Greed and amnesia: the devils in financial history". www.theguardian.com. October 10, 2008.

  4 Copy quote

• Liberty in Islam is the liberty to be a Muslim, democracy likewise, individualism likewise.

  James Buchan

  Islam, Democracy, Liberty

  "Frozen assets" by James Buchan, www.theguardian.com. May 29, 2004.

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• 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.

  James Buchan

  Europe, Oil, Gdp

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• At the heart of banking is a suicidal strategy. Banks take money from the public or each other on call, skim it for their own reward and then lock the rest up in volatile, insecure and illiquid loans that at times they cannot redeem without public aid.

  James Buchan

  Heart, Suicidal, Insecure

  4 Copy quote

• Were there peace and justice in the Middle East, the Arabs would no more need their tinhorn dictators than they would their corpulent princes.

  James Buchan

  Justice, Middle East, Needs

  4 Copy quote

• We generally write best of what we ourselves have seen.

  James Buchan

  Writing

  "Memory games" by James Buchan, www.theguardian.com. March 18, 2005.

  4 Copy quote

• The world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation.

  James Buchan

  Fall, Doubt, World

  "Market failures" by James Buchan, www.theguardian.com. May 2, 2008.

  7 Copy quote

• Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.

  James Buchan

  Arabia, Virtue, States

  "Lifting the veil". www.theguardian.com. November 12, 2004.

  16 Copy quote

• Losing your capital is like losing your trousers. It is a real humiliation, and one not to be soon repeated.

  James Buchan

  Real, Losing, Humiliation

  9 Copy quote

• If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.

  James Buchan

  Passion, History, Waiting

  52 Copy quote

• By pouring money and goods into devastated regions, foreign aid workers sometimes compound the disruption and debauch the survivors.

  James Buchan

  Survivor, Pouring, Sometimes

  "War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times by Linda Polman". www.theguardian.com. May 7, 2010.

  52 Copy quote

• Any new financial order for the world must tackle the three chief challenges of our age.

  James Buchan

  Birthday, Order, Challenges

  4 Copy quote

• All UK nuclear power stations should be shut down without delay.

  James Buchan

  Nuclear, Delay, Should

  "A complete waste of energy". www.theguardian.com. September 12, 2002.

  7 Copy quote

• Saudi Arabia operates according to the belief that God made young men and women so utterly and completely without self-control that they must be physically segregated every moment of the day and night.

  James Buchan

  Night, Men, Self

  "Lifting the veil". www.theguardian.com. November 12, 2004.

  16 Copy quote

• Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

  James Buchan

  Doe, Purpose, Warning

  "The role of snow" by James Buchan, www.theguardian.com. September 22, 2007.

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Self Worth, Thinking, Bankers

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• 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.

  James Buchan

  Years, Tasks, Three

  "A complete waste of energy". www.theguardian.com. September 12, 2002.

  22 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Buchan

  Europe, Purpose, Machines

  "Hitler's gold". www.theguardian.com. August 11, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

• The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times.

  James Buchan

  Years, Age, Firsts

  4 Copy quote

• The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags.

  James Buchan

  Philosophy, Political, Bags

  "Market failures". www.theguardian.com. May 2, 2008.

  5 Copy quote

• My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences.

  James Buchan

  Fashion, Reality, Cities

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• 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.

  James Buchan

  Country, Jesus, Children

  57 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Buchan

  Suicide, Giving, Victory

  "Inside the mind of a terrorist". www.theguardian.com. September 16, 2001.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Distance, Grief, Eye

  7 Copy quote

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