Jeremy Paxman QUOTES

1 " ... 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. "

― Jeremy Paxman , Empire

2 " There was a general tendency to ascribe almost any irregular or bad behaviour to the French. [...] A tonsil-tickling embrace is still known as a French kiss, as if somehow it would never have occurred to an English person to stick their tongue into another person's mouth if the French hadn't invented it. "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

3 " What does it say about your society that it admits only those who do not care very much to belong? For a start, it suggests that the English don’t much care to be liked. They prefer the company of other misanthropes. Since no misanthrope worth the name would actually want to join a club, eager applicants must be snubbed. "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

4 " In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘English Traits’ I came across a meteorological explanation of the Englishman’s character. ‘Born in a harsh and wet climate, which keeps him indoors whenever he is at rest,’ he writes, ‘domesticity is the taproot which enables the nation to branch wide and high. The motive and end of their trade is to guard the independence and privacy of their homes.’9 I wondered whether the English weather might really be the key. "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

5 " Outside, on a February afternoon, a middle-aged blonde clatters by, pulling her coat tighter around her. ‘Ooh, isn’t it cold?’ she says, to no one in particular. There is a faintly Russian look to her dyed hair, with the roots showing black at the parting, and for a moment I wonder whether the Russians ever tried to infiltrate the Met Office, which is still classified as part of the country’s defence system. But she cannot be Russian: no true Russian would think it worth saying it was cold in February. It’s how things are in Russia in winter. No, the capacity for infinite surprise at the weather is distinctly English. "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

6 " Odette Keun was overcome by the small civilities that punctuated every transaction. ‘The matter, the real matter, with these people’, she decided, ‘is that they are polite … Courtesy, kindness, obligingness, tolerance, moderation, self-control, fair play, a cheerful temper, pleasant manners, calmness, stoicism, and an extremely high degree of social civilisation, these are the adorable things I discovered in the English.’ But they came with a price. A born tendency to compromise meant they were incapable of making up their minds. And worse, they were insufferable snobs.16 (Miss Keun claimed to have stood in front of a public lavatory that proclaimed GENTLEMEN ONE PENNY; MEN FREE and round the corner LADIES ONE PENNY; WOMEN FREE. As she stood gasping at the implications of this urinary caste system, she was comforted to be approached by a policeman who asked if she was short of a penny.) "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

7 " The English at least have the saving grace of being able to laugh at themselves. Which must be based upon a profound self-assurance. Since the performance of the state as a whole has been less than impressive in the last five decades, its roots must be in the individual. 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. "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

8 " The silly slogan used for selling this new country was ‘Cool Britannia’, at which any truly cool person could only wince or shudder: when middle-aged politicians embrace youth culture they always get it wrong. "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

9 " Diana’s death was tragic, as any sudden death in the prime of life is tragic. But was it any more tragic than that of any of the numberless thousands of young men and women whose short lives are commemorated on war memorials in every village and town in the land? Diana was beautiful, manipulative, compassionate, and had died enjoying the life of a rich nightclubber. Yet she had somehow become an underdog and you cannot exaggerate English sympathy for the underdog. "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

10 " 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. "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

11 " The Seven Years War of 1756–63 has often been considered the first ‘world war’. It certainly shares its European origins with the First and Second World Wars. But it might also be considered the point at which the British recognized the extent to which their destiny lay not in Europe but elsewhere. "

― Jeremy Paxman , Empire

12 " Everything human … has its period: nations, like mortal men, advance only to decline; dismembered empire and diminished glory mark a crisis in the constitution; "

― Jeremy Paxman , Empire

13 " Before it was necessary for foreign visitors to reverence the British Empire, one visitor after another commented on the remarkable vanity of the English. In 1497, a Venetian noticed that ‘the English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves and no other world but England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner they say “he looks like an Englishman” and that “it is a great pity that he should not be an Englishman "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

14 " The doctor begins his seduction with the classic English gambit of commenting on the weather. "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

15 " It takes some believing, but it was not until 1869 that Emily Davies founded Girton as a Cambridge college for women, and when, in 1896, the university came to vote on whether women should be allowed to face examinations for degrees, The Times printed train timetables, to enable London-based graduates to travel to Cambridge to vote against the proposition. The university did not allow women full membership until 1948. "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

16 " It could produce the most extraordinary consequences, as the life of C. B. Fry demonstrates. The son of a chief accountant at Scotland Yard, he had played in the FA Cup before he left Repton School in 1890 and appeared for Surrey county cricket team in the time between school and university (Oxford, inevitably, and the top scholarship at Wadham College). By the time of his graduation, he had represented the university at cricket, soccer and athletics, tied the world long-jump record at 23 feet 6½ inches, and only missed playing wing three-quarter for the Oxford rugby team because of injury. He managed, in passing, to win a first in classics. "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

17 " Once away from home, a good thrashing was accepted as an essential part of the process of turning out a gentleman. The champion flogger was the Reverend Dr John Keate, appointed headmaster of Eton in 1809, who beat an average of ten boys each day (excluding his day of rest on Sundays). On 30 June 1832 came his greatest achievement, the thrashing of over eighty of his pupils. At the end of this marathon, the boys stood and cheered him. It says something about the spirit of these places that he was later able to tell some of the school’s old boys of his regret that he hadn’t flogged them more often. "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

18 " (I had been particularly taken by a scene in The Old Country where Hilary, the spy who has defected to Moscow, muses about England: ‘We’re conceived in irony. We float in it from the womb. It’s the amniotic fluid. It’s the silver sea. It’s the waters at their priest-like task, washing away guilt and purpose and responsibility. Joking but not joking. Caring but not caring. Serious but not serious. "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

19 " in fact, as a woman, I have no country "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People

20 " 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. "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People