James Buchan Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

• The world dominion of western thought, forms of organisation, technology and military force is not God-given, nor eternal, nor greatly appreciated by the rest of the world.

  James Buchan

  Military, Technology, World

  "The last great heresy" by James Buchan, www.theguardian.com. July 5, 2002.

  4 Copy quote

• There are about 15 million Muslims in the EU. They face ignorance, insult and even persecution. They cannot be wished away. To impose Enlightenment freedoms is self-defeating. Anyway, the Muslims have their own enlightenment.

  James Buchan

  Ignorance, Self, Enlightenment

  "Freedoms in the balance" by James Buchan, www.theguardian.com. February 6, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

• The use of refined petroleum as fuel, which began in the 1850s, freed hundreds of millions of people from the toil of centuries, gave hundreds of millions more a life of ease and plenty, and, by allowing great cities to feed themselves from every corner of the world, multiplied the population of the earth fivefold.

  James Buchan

  Cities, People, Toil

  10 Copy quote

• The dividing line between wish and need was never clear.

  James Buchan

  Wish, Needs, Lines

  4 Copy quote

• Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.

  James Buchan

  Character, Greed, Expansion

  4 Copy quote

• We read too much Shakespeare at school, and view our parliamentary politics as dynastic drama, in which an impatient crown prince frets at his long subordination and begins to scheme for the throne he knows he merits, was promised and has earned.

  James Buchan

  Drama, School, Views

  "Proceed with Caution". Book review, www.theguardian.com. October 18, 2003.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Buchan

  Kings, Leader, Important

  4 Copy quote

• 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 (NAR), which was immediately dubbed by the boomers of the UK Treasury "the modern Domesday Book".

  James Buchan

  Book, London, Modern

  "Judgment Day... again" by James Buchan, www.theguardian.com. August 6, 2001.

  5 Copy quote

• Ever since the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the Muslim world has been in slow decline relative to the west. With Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the creeping British annexation of Muslim India, that decline took on a malign aspect.

  James Buchan

  Egypt, World, Invasion

  8 Copy quote

• 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

• Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader.

  James Buchan

  Cutting, Pages, Firsts

  "Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann". www.theguardian.com. September 11, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

• The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.

  James Buchan

  Country, Dog, Men

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

  16 Copy quote

• The aircraft that blew up the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington conveyed several messages to the world, of which one of the least remarked is this: the Muslims of the world are suffering.

  James Buchan

  New York, Suffering, World

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Buchan

  Suicide, War, Struggle

  "A history of suicide killers" by James Buchan, www.theguardian.com. September 17, 2001.

  16 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

  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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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