James Buchan Quotes

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

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

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

Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.

A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.

Since the attack on the United States on September 11 2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, there must be few people who have not felt a twinge of nostalgia for the cold war.

Economists, like royal children, are not punished for their errors.

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

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

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.

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

Profits in business always depend on the rate of interest: the higher the interest, the higher the rate of profit required.

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

In rising financial markets, the world is forever new. The bull or optimist has no eyes for past or present, but only for the future, where streams of revenue play in his imagination.

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.

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

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

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

Life without oil, in fact, would be so different that it is frightening to contemplate. We are addicted, and it is no comfortable addiction.

We generally write best of what we ourselves have seen.

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

The dividing line between wish and need was never clear.

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.

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.