Jeremy Paxman Quotes

“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.”

“The English approach to ideas is not to kill them, but to let them die of neglect.”

“The English at least have the saving grace of being able to laugh at themselves. Which must be based upon a profound self-assurance.”

“The English do not take pride in the achievements of their governments: they know they consist at best of ‘characters’ and at worst of charlatans. If a British Prime Minister appeared on television and began addressing them as American Presidents address their people (‘Mah feller Mericans’ as Richard Nixon used to say) their audience would fall about laughing.”