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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James Buchan
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 11
Journalist
Novelist
James Ernest Buchan
Hon. James Ernest Buchan
School
Shakespeare
Crown
Much
Merit
Impatient
Dynastic
Long
Begins
Thrones
Frets
Drama
Crowns
Subordination
View
Earned
Parliamentary
Views
Promised
Merits
Politics
Schemes
Throne
Read
Prince
Scheme

More quotes by James Buchan

Image
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
Image
A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.
James Buchan
Image
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.
James Buchan
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.
James Buchan
Image
We generally write best of what we ourselves have seen.
James Buchan
Image
Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.
James Buchan
Image
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
Image
It is time to end the western policy of malign neglect. It is in the interest of the whole world to help tackle the actual grievances in Palestine, Kashmir, and in central and southern Iraq, and to help the region out of its economic backwardness.
James Buchan
Image
The world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation.
James Buchan
Image
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.
James Buchan
Image
The prevailing ideology of the modern west - which is political economy - is in the doghouse. Having failed to notice atmospheric pollution, the economists then frightened themselves with the sort of financial crisis they said they had abolished.
James Buchan
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.
James Buchan
Image
Europe and North America, we are told, are less dependent on energy-intensive heavy industry than in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we squeeze more GDP out of a barrel of oil than in those benighted days.
James Buchan
Image
Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.
James Buchan