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
If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside. – 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
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
Beside every great success are the seeds of enormous failure. In every failure, theres the opportunity seeds of great success. Theyre not miles apart. So if theyre that close together, and if youre really working, youre always gonna have that likelihood that somethings not going to work. – Peter Guber