Quotes by

James Buchan

The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britains belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago. – James Buchan

Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science – steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains – none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last centurys attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission. – James Buchan

Whatever else it was, Adolf Hitlers short-lived regime was also a colossal industrial process by which the wealth and productive power of much of Europe was wrenched from its normal purposes and converted into a machine for killing. – James Buchan

To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, youre better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature – and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century. – James Buchan

Because bankers measure their self-worth in money, and pay themselves a lot of it, they think theyre fine fellows and dont need to explain themselves. – James Buchan

Bulls dont read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929. – James Buchan

Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue. – James Buchan

Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka. – James Buchan

Since the attack on the United States on September 11 2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, there must be few people who have not felt a twinge of nostalgia for the cold war. – James Buchan

The world dominion of western thought, forms of organisation, technology and military force is not God-given, nor eternal, nor greatly appreciated by the rest of the world. – James Buchan

In modern society, where most people live in cities, and where both needs and wishes are absolved through the same remote agency – money – the distinction between wishes and needs has altogether vanished. – James Buchan

We read too much Shakespeare at school, and view our parliamentary politics as dynastic drama, in which an impatient crown prince frets at his long subordination and begins to scheme for the throne he knows he merits, was promised and has earned. – James Buchan

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice. – James Buchan

Were there peace and justice in the Middle East, the Arabs would no more need their tinhorn dictators than they would their corpulent princes. – James Buchan

To give money to a woman – and here I must speak as a man – is to deny her special quality, her irreplaceability, and reduce her unique amiability to a commodity. Money takes away her name, while transforming her lover into a nameless customer of a market of appetites. – James Buchan

The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times. – James Buchan

If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside. – James Buchan

One of the consequences of the Iranian revolution has been an explosion of history. A country once known only from British consular reports and intrepid travelogues is now awash with historical documents, letters, diaries, grainy video, weblogs and secret police files of questionable authenticity. – James Buchan

Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing. – James Buchan

The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags. – James Buchan