Evan Davis Quotes

Nice guys finish last, but we get to sleep in.

It's not a bad idea to occasionally spend a little time thinking about things you take for granted. Plain everyday things.

In principle, there are only three main components of spending that much matter to monetary policy: consumer spending, business investment and exports and trade.

We are more likely to cheat if we see others doing so. We tend to conform to accepted norms of reasonable behaviour, rather than adhere to strict rules.

Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car.

If you're not making some mistakes, it probably means you're not trying hard enough.

Men don't know much about women. We do know when they're happy. We know when they're crying, and we know when they're pissed off. We just don't know in what order these are gonna come at us.

It's amazing, if you know what you want to say, how fast it is to write.

Being funny, it turns out, is like being a bank. It's a confidence trick. As long as everyone believes in you, you are fine.

What comes with a job as a staff member of the BBC is a certain self-censoring that you get utterly used to. You don't say everything you think. You hold back on some things.

Mistakes are nothing to be ashamed of.

What is so striking about Liberia is that in a place where there is so much to be done, I have never seen so many people with nothing to do.

Reducing every issue to an argument can become stale but it's often a very good way of clarifying issues.

But sometimes it's good to dare yourself to do the unthinkable. And rather than stand in front of an audience with no clothes on, I decided to have a go at stand-up comedy.

We all know that Americans love their statistics - in sport, obviously. And in finance too.

Even the 'Today' programme involves a balance between the worthy-but-heavy items with the worthless-but-entertainingly-light ones.

Personally, I'd like us to have a few more women on the 'Today' programme.

I don't want to sound like 'chirpy Evan' who's just bouncing around with his unrealistic views and doesn't understand what's going on.

The two questions that anyone ever asks me are: 'Are house prices going to go down?' and 'Is it a good time to fix my mortgage rate?'

One of the key problems is that the Germans know what they do because everywhere they go there's a 'made in Germany' label on it - they can feel proud of Volkswagens and Audis and Mercedes.

The key thing about me is that I'm really not very interesting.

At the BBC we've had plenty of women in good management jobs. It comes and goes but there's been plenty. On air, I think there's quite a bit more we can do.

Historically, the British have always been rather wary of grand engineering projects - perhaps understandably, given that many of them have been delivered late and over budget.

Interestingly, human irrationality is a hot topic in economics at the moment. Behavioural economics it's called, on the cusp of economics and psychology.

I swing both ways. I can see things from a kind of conservative point of view and from a more socially liberal or left-wing point of view.

We escaped the last big bursting of a bubble - the dotcom bubble - with a relatively light U.S. recession. On that occasion, the world economy found its way back on track fairly quickly.

I actually profoundly think the world's a better place when economics is fairly boring... The more boring the better.

My instinct is to assume that we consumers are an inconsistent bunch. We like competition if it delivers low prices, but grumble if it delivers the bad news that prices need to go up.

For me, the main principle for broadcasters has to be that if people stand to benefit from an interview, they should be prepared to face some downside as well.