Jeremy Paxman > Quotes

“... 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

“Because the English do not consume significantly more alcohol than other European peoples, this booziness must be something to do with the way in which they drink. George Steiner once told me, ‘You’d never find Sartre in an English café for two reasons. A: No Sartre. B: No café.’ He is right. The collapse of British imperial power produced no explosion of creative thought to match that of Vienna in the dying days of the Habsburg Empire – Freud, Brahms, Mahler and Klimt and the rest – and one of the reasons may perhaps be to do with the lack of a café society. Marxism was a café phenomenon until it gained power.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“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

“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

“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

“There is a deep social contract with tolerance and an instinctive distrust of cleverness or eloquence. If the Lord God came to England and started expounding his beliefs, you know what they’d say? They’d say ‘Oh, come off it!”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“To believe that any intellectual position is worth dying or killing for is a leap no English academic could make. It is a cliché that there are no intellectuals in England. It is also untrue. But if you are going to be an intellectual in England, you had better do it discreetly, and certainly not call yourself an intellectual. It does not do to grow passionate about your beliefs or to believe that every problem has a solution.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“in fact, as a woman, I have no country”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“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

“The doctor begins his seduction with the classic English gambit of commenting on the weather.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“Authors like Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd or Julian Barnes engage with metropolitan subject-matter, but the books that sell by the container-load are historical romances. The upper classes may have lost their political power, but they still manage to set the social tone and determine the aspirations of the ambitious.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“In a vast open-plan office, notable for its astonishing quiet (in an hour and a half not a single telephone rings), the Oxford lexicographers try to keep track of how the language is changing. Desktop screens flash with messages from lookouts across the English-speaking world, bringing news of new coinings. An informant has contacted them to report what she thinks is the first sighting of the expression ‘bad hair day’. It turns out to have been in a newspaper in Seattle. A correspondent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has discovered a hitherto unknown early use of ‘Maltese’, predating anything in the dictionary. A subdued excitement follows.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“It followed that if a man was to maintain his position, the woman of the house could not be seen to go out to work. (One consequence of the need to preserve the appearance of prosperity on one income was that the husband and father figure was obliged to work longer and longer hours to earn the means to keep the family afloat, becoming in the process the distant, cold figure of caricature.)”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“But what is perhaps most curious about the English experience is the way in which a belief that they had been chosen by God could have produced a version of religion so temporizing, pliable and undogmatic. After all, orthodox Judaism, which is built upon the assertion that the Jews are the chosen people, is one of the most demanding, prescriptive religions on earth. But there is scarcely anything prescriptive about the Church of England.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“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

“Politically, kings became figures of no importance. Yet those that survived possessed a quality which politicians can peruse for years and still never acquire. They had the vital attribute of legitimacy because they occupied a role they had never striven for- one, furthermore, which would continue when they and their prime ministers were long gone.”
― Jeremy Paxman, On Royalty

“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

“We could start by considering what the English have given the world. And here is the first problem. For the greatest legacy the English have bequeathed the rest of humanity is their language. When an Icelander meets a Peruvian, each reaches for his English. Even in the Second World War, when the foundations were being laid for the Axis pact between Germany, Japan and Italy, Yosuke Matsuoka was negotiating for the Emperor in English. It is the medium of technology, science, travel and international politics. Three quarters of the world’s mail is written in English, four fifths of all data stored on computers is in English and the language is used by two thirds of the world’s scientists.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“The moment a Frenchman opens his mouth, he declares his identity. The French speak French. The English speak a language which belongs to no one.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“The animosity in the English terms reflects a bizarre schizophrenia about the French people.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“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

“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

“What does this paucity of national symbols mean? You could argue that it demonstrates a certain self-confidence. No English person can look at the swearing of allegiance that takes place in American schools every day without feeling bewilderment: that sort of public declaration of patriotism seems so, well, naïve. When an Irishman wears a bunch of shamrock on St Patrick’s Day, the English look on with patronizing indulgence: scarcely anyone sports a rose on St George’s Day. This worldly wisdom soon elides into a general view that any public display of national pride is not merely unsophisticated but somehow morally reprehensible. George Orwell noticed it as long ago as 1948 when he wrote that In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman, and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse-racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“But Faiers had decided that you didn’t have to be English to be ‘English’. ‘The actor James Stewart, for example, he was American, but he had Englishness. He didn’t brag about himself. He wasn’t pushy. He had one wife all his life. You could trust him with your wallet. That’s English.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“How else can one explain the survival of so much that is so utterly pointless – barristers’ wigs, bearskins, an unelected House of Lords, flummeries from the Trooping the Colour to Swan-upping, or archaic-sounding offices of state like Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster or Warden of the Cinque Ports? In the end, it gets to everyone: those who start their adulthood in passionate argument for modernization end up dreaming of a seat in the House of Lords.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“The sons of those who had survived the horrors of the trenches were marching off to war again, singing, There’ll always be an England While there’s a country lane, Wherever there’s a cottage small Beside a field of grain.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“Churchill once explained... ‘a great battle is lost: parliament turns out the Government. A great battle is won- crowds cheer the Queen.”
― Jeremy Paxman, On Royalty

“An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only being uncomfortable. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Man and Superman”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“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

“The most characteristic English statement about belief is ‘Well, I’m not particularly religious’, faintly embarrassed by the suggestion that there might be something more to life. It sometimes seems the Church of England thinks God is just the ultimate ‘good chap’.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People