Boris Johnson Quotes

• “My point is that this Potter business has legs. It will run and run, and we must be utterly mad, as a country, to leave it to the Americans to make money from a great British invention. I appeal to the children of this country and to their Potter-fiend parents to write to Warner Bros and Universal, and perhaps, even, to the great J K herself. Bring Harry home to Britain—and if you want a site with less rainfall than Rome, with excellent public transport, and strong connections to Harry Potter, I have just the place.”

  Boris Johnson

  29 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

• “In the words of Mr Thierry Coup of Warner Bros: 'We are taking the most iconic and powerful moments of the stories and putting them in an immersive environment. It is taking the theme park experience to a new level.' And of course I wish Thierry and his colleagues every possible luck, and I am sure it will be wonderful. But I cannot conceal my feelings; and the more I think of those millions of beaming kids waving their wands and scampering the Styrofoam turrets of Hogwartse_STmk, and the more I think of those millions of poor put-upon parents who must now pay to fly to Orlando and pay to buy wizard hats and wizard cloaks and wizard burgers washed down with wizard meade_STmk, the more I grind my teeth in jealous irritation.
  
  Because the fact is that Harry Potter is not American. He is British. Where is Diagon Alley, where they buy wands and stuff? It is in London, and if you want to get into the Ministry of Magic you disappear down a London telephone box. The train for Hogwarts goes from King's Cross, not Grand Central Station, and what is Harry Potter all about? It is about the ritual and intrigue and dorm-feast excitement of a British boarding school of a kind that you just don't find in America. Hogwarts is a place where children occasionally get cross with each other—not 'mad'—and where the situation is usually saved by a good old British sense of HUMOUR. WITH A U. RIGHT? NOT HUMOR. GOTTIT?”

  Boris Johnson

  19 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “I want you to know that I have nothing against Orlando, though you are, of course, far more likely to get shot or robbed there than in London.”

  Boris Johnson

  10 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

• “You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth—and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere.”

  Boris Johnson

  6 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity. It has been said that the difference between Hitler’s speeches and Churchill’s speeches was that Hitler made you think he could do anything; Churchill made you think you could do anything.”

  Boris Johnson

  6 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “The key thing is to be "Conservative in principle but Liberal in sympathy".”

  Boris Johnson

  5 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

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

  Boris Johnson

  4 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “London is—after Athens and Rome—the third most influential city in history.”

  Boris Johnson

  3 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “He is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces. The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference.”

  Boris Johnson

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “Take the one about the time he was sitting next to a clean-living Methodist bishop—at a reception, allegedly, in Canada—when a good-looking young waitress came up and offered them both a glass of sherry from a tray. Churchill took one. But the bishop said, ‘Young lady, I would rather commit adultery than take an intoxicating beverage.’ At which point Churchill beckoned the girl, and said, ‘Come back, lassie, I didn’t know we had a choice.”

  Boris Johnson

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism—that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous.”

  Boris Johnson

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “David Lloyd George had been to Germany, and been so dazzled by the Führer that he compared him to George Washington. Hitler was a ‘born leader’, declared the befuddled former British Prime Minister. He wished that Britain had ‘a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today’. This from the hero of the First World War! The man who had led Britain to victory over the Kaiser!”

  Boris Johnson

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “(Never in the field of human conflict has) So much been owed by So many to So few. If you want a classic ascending tricolon, then try his peerless line from 1942, after the victory at El Alamein. Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. When he uncorks this one at the”

  Boris Johnson

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

• “Cybele, or the Great Mother—Magna Mater. This Cybele was supposed to have conceived a passion for a young man named Atys, and when Atys failed to respond to her advances, she became jealous. When she caught him having it off with someone else, she drove him so mad that he castrated himself. I am afraid that respectable young Londoners had celebrated their devotion to Magna Mater by doing the same—and we know this for sure because the river near London Bridge has also yielded a fearful set of serrated forceps, adorned with the heads of Eastern divinities.”

  Boris Johnson

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “It was the eternal contest for reputation and prestige that encouraged Londoners to endow new hospitals or write great plays or crack the problem of longitude for the navy. No matter how agreeable your surroundings, you couldn’t get famous by sitting around in some village, and that is still true today. You need people to acknowledge what you have done; you need a gallery for the applause; and above all you need to know what everyone else is up to.”

  Boris Johnson

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “Accident, agree, bagpipe, blunder, box, chant, desk, digestion, dishonest, examination, femininity, finally, funeral, horizon, increase, infect, obscure, observe, princess, scissors, superstitious, universe, village: those are just some of the everyday words that Chaucer introduced to the language through his poetry.”

  Boris Johnson

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “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.”

  Boris Johnson

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “These days we dimly believe that the Second World War was won with Russian blood and American money; and though that is in some ways true, it is also true that, without Churchill, Hitler would almost certainly have won.”

  Boris Johnson

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “My hero is the mayor in Jaws. He's a fantastic guy, and he keeps the beaches open, if you remember, even after it's demonstrated that his constituents have been eaten by this killer fish. Of course, he was proved catastrophically wrong in his judgment, but his instincts were right.'
  
  Boris Johnson is the mayor of London.
  Taken from Time Magazine interview: June 25, 2012; page 76.”

  Boris Johnson

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “Augustine said he wept more for the death of Dido than he did for the death of his own saviour. What about Book Four, the best book of the best poem of the best poet?”

  Boris Johnson

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement

• “First Lord of the Admiralty, long enough to engineer what an anti-Churchillian would say was an epic and unparalleled military disaster—a feat of incompetent generalship that made the Charge of the Light Brigade look positively slick. It was an attempt to outflank the stalemate on the Western Front that not only ended in humiliation for the British armed forces; it cost the lives of so many Australians and New Zealanders that to this day their 1915 expedition to Turkey is the number-one source of pom-bashing and general anti-British feeling among Antipodeans.”

  Boris Johnson

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “There was one thing the public could say for certain about Churchill: that there was nothing that he was going to ask the British armed forces to do that he would not have done himself.”

  Boris Johnson

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Churchill decides from very early on that he will create a political position that is somehow above left and right, embodying the best points of both sides and thereby incarnating the will of the nation. He thinks of himself as a gigantic keystone in the arch, with all the lesser stones logically induced to support his position. He has a kind of semi-ideology to go with it—a leftish Toryism: imperialist, romantic, but on the side of the working man.”

  Boris Johnson

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “The Shakespearean theatre was the product of the entrepreneurial maritime culture of the age,”

  Boris Johnson

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Lear’s daughters and their loathsome husbands are all deservedly slaughtered for their ill treatment of an aged ruler (one of the reasons that tragedy remains so huge in Asia)”

  Boris Johnson

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement