James Buchan Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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 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 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• There are signs that the age of petroleum has passed its zenith. Adjusted for inflation, a barrel of crude oil now sells for three times its long-run average. The large western oil companies, which cartellised the industry for much of the 20th century, are now selling more oil than they find, and are thus in the throes of liquidation.

  James Buchan

  Birthday, Running, Average

  16 Copy quote

• One of the admirable features of British novelists is that they have no scruple about setting their stories in foreign settings with wholly foreign personnel.

  James Buchan

  Novelists, Stories, Scruples

  "Sold, for two truckloads of oranges" by James Buchan, www.theguardian.com. February 11, 2006.

  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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