Boris Johnson Quotes Page 2

“I've done eight years as mayor of London. I enjoyed it hugely; it was a massive privilege.”

“If gay marriage was OK... then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men; or indeed three men and a dog.”

“If people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors.”

“If we judged everybody by the stupid, unguarded things they blurt out to their nearest and dearest, then we wouldn't ever get anywhere.”

“It is easy to make promises – it is hard work to keep them.”

“It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time.”

“It would be a sad day if we British stopped being cynical, but you sometimes wonder whether we overdo it.”

“It's not reasonable for companies that have chief executives and board members who are paid very considerable sums to subsidise low pay through in-work benefits.”

“London is a fantastic creator of jobs – but many of these jobs are going to people who don't originate in this country.”

“My chances of being Prime Minister are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.”

“My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.”

“My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg.”

“Never in my life did I think I would be congratulated by Mick Jagger for achieving anything.”

“No one obeys the speed limit except a motorised rickshaw.”

“Obama's extraordinary political skills suggest he is more than capable of rising above any personal historical grudges he may have inherited.”

“Ping-pong was invented on the dining tables of England in the 19th century, and it was called Wiff-waff! And there, I think, you have the difference between us and the rest of the world. Other nations, the French, looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner; we looked at it an saw an opportunity to play Wiff-waff.”

“Some people play the piano, some do Sudoku, some watch television, some people go out to dinner parties. I write books.”

“Sometimes I can think of so many ways of expressing myself that I feel I'm an old typewriter, and too many keys come forward at once – and I get jammed.”

“That is the best case for Bush; that, among other things, he liberated Iraq. It is good enough for me.”

“The beauty and riddle in studying the motives of any politician is in trying to decide what is idealism and what is self-interest, and often we are left to conclude that the answer is a mixture of the two.”

“The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP they have run out of better ideas.”

“The euro has become a means by which superior German productivity is able to gain an absolutely unbeatable advantage over the whole eurozone territory.”

“The idea that the EU is somehow the guarantor of peace on the continent – that is in itself rash, in my view, and risks undermining the vital role of Nato.”

“The Italians, who used to be a great motor-manufacturing power, have been absolutely destroyed by the euro – as was intended by the Germans.”

“The Lib Dems are not just empty. They are a void within a vacuum surrounded by a vast inanition.”

“The meat in the sausage has got to be Conservative.”

“The Remain campaign... I've never seen a more miserable offering. All they are saying is stay in and we'll do our best to make sure that Britain's Parliamentary independence isn't eroded faster than we can possibly imagine.”

“The truth is that the history of the last couple of thousand years has been broadly repeated attempts by various people or institutions – in a Freudian way – to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe, this golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, by trying to unify it.”

“There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.”

“There is absolutely no one, apart from yourself, who can prevent you, in the middle of the night, from sneaking down to tidy up the edges of that hunk of cheese at the back of the fridge.”