Jeremy Paxman Quotes

“Cycling is easily the quickest way around central London, faster than bus, Tube or taxi. You can predict precisely how long every journey will take, regardless of traffic jams, Tube strikes or leaves on the line. It provides excellent exercise. It does not pollute the atmosphere. It does not clog up the streets.”

“Has there ever been a visitor to Ludlow who hasn't wished they lived there?”

“I find it odd that people take me seriously.”

“I hate the word 'sneering', I can't help the way my face looks.”

“I've always felt myself to be an outsider. I've always felt awkward.”

“I’ve always thought you have to live life looking forwards, not backwards. I’ve had no interest at all in who my ancestors are.”

“I’ve spent my whole life being told I have a face like a horse. You are just what you are, aren’t you?”

“It seems to me that the way to remove people's cynicism is, when asked a straight question, to give a straight answer.”

“It's not just politicians. Any spokesman for a vested interest is well schooled in how to say what it is they wish to say, which may bear no relation at all to what you've asked them.”

“It's stupid to have a simple-minded view.”

“Scepticism is a necessary and vital part of the journalist's toolkit. But when scepticism becomes cynicism it can close off thought and block the search for truth.”

“Sharing holiday snaps on social media is an act of arrogant vanity.”

“Television bosses should stop insulting the public's intelligence by assuming we are all idiots.”

“The cure for cynicism is simply to engage honestly.”

“The defining problem of contemporary television is trust: Can you believe what you see on television, does television treat people fairly, is it healthy for society?”

“The early bird may get the worm, but its the second mouse that gets the cheese.”

“The idea of a tax on the ownership of a television belongs in the 1950s. Why not tax people for owning a washing machine to fund the manufacture of Persil?”

“The promise of Western capitalism of ever rising rates of pay has turned out to be the cheque that bounced.”

“Watching TV is the most popular leisure activity in Britain. I find that very depressing.”

“Everything human has its period: nations, like mortal men, advance only to decline.”

“Instead of trying to grapple with the implications of the story of empire, the British seem to have decided just to ignore it. The most corrosive part of this amnesia is a sense that because the nation is not what it was, it can never be anything again.”

“Riding is about bending it to your will, and public riding is to demonstrate that authority.”

“The central conundrum of the new mass-media age could be summarised as to how to retain a distance while appearing intimate – for distance without intimacy nourishes public hostility, while intimacy without distance destroys respect.”

“The central difficulty for royalty when it comes to political matters is that they are somehow expected to be in the world and yet not of it, to speak for their people and yet to have nothing to say until someone writes it for them. To be, in short, an empty vessel.”

“They keep the position of head of state out of the hands of those who want it just to gratify their ambition.”

“If you are Pakistani or Indian you might just as well commit suicide when the team is humiliated; if you’re West Indian, you might feel the world has fallen apart when things go wrong at the Oval. But these are countries where cricket is one of the leading suppliers of national pride. In England, you don’t support cricket teams, you follow them. It’s the game you support, not the team.”

“No one thought it odd that at her funeral Elton John should perform a reworking of the song he had originally composed as hero-worship to Marilyn Monroe, for she too was an icon for a secular age and in the end icons of that kind are interchangeable.”

“Small wonder that so many English writers have preferred the dramatic certainties of Catholicism. You simply couldn’t write a novel like Graham Greene’s 'The Power and the Glory' about a church built on the conviction that anything can be settled over a cup of tea.”

“The animosity in the English terms reflects a bizarre schizophrenia about the French people.”

“The doctor begins his seduction with the classic English gambit of commenting on the weather.”