James Buchan Quotes - Page 2

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• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  James Buchan

  Wish, Needs, Lines

  4 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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