James Buchan Quotes

• Rarely in modern times has there been such a revolution in commercial sentiment as occurred in 2008, or such a display in government and business of panic and helplessness.

  James Buchan

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• Profits in business always depend on the rate of interest: the higher the interest, the higher the rate of profit required.

  James Buchan

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• Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born revolutionary who is believed by most Arab and Iranian observers to be the inspiration of the attacks in New York and Washington, is the best known of the Islamic militants to have emerged in the past 20 years and the least difficult to fathom.

  James Buchan

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• 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 A country once known only from British consular reports and intrepid travelogues is now awash with historical documents, letters, diaries, grainy video, weblogs and secret police files of questionable authenticity.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

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• One of the admirable features of British novelists is that they have no scruple about setting their stories in foreign settings with wholly foreign personnel.

  James Buchan

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• 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 century’s attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.

  James Buchan

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• Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.

  James Buchan

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• My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences.

  James Buchan

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• Losing your capital is like losing your trousers. It is a real humiliation, and one not to be soon repeated.

  James Buchan

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• Life without oil, in fact, would be so different that it is frightening to contemplate. We are addicted, and it is no comfortable addiction.

  James Buchan

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• Last chances in the Middle East have been two a dirham since the 1950s. Each year the enmities are more profound, the despots more bloodthirsty and clownish, the violence more extreme, and the conditions of ordinary existence more ghastly.

  James Buchan

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• It is time to end the western policy of malign neglect. It is in the interest of the whole world to help tackle the actual grievances in Palestine, Kashmir, and in central and southern Iraq, and to help the region out of its economic backwardness.

  James Buchan

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• In rising financial markets, the world is forever new. The bull or optimist has no eyes for past or present, but only for the future, where streams of revenue play in his imagination.

  James Buchan

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• 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

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• In falling markets, there is nothing that has not happened before. The bear or pessimist sees only the past, which imprisons the wretched financial soul in eternal circles of boom and bust and boom again.

  James Buchan

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

  James Buchan

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• Governments of rich countries spend some $6bn of tax money a year on disaster relief and development aid overseas, while each new earthquake, famine or tidal wave can attract 1,000 aid organisations, from the United Nations Children’s Fund and Oxfam to the ‘Jesus Brigades’ of the American south and other charitable adventurers.

  James Buchan

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• For all their current prestige, Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers are still regarded in all but the most desperate districts of Gaza or Peshawar as romantics with little chance of more than symbolic victories, however bloody and brutal. That gives both the Middle East and the West a small and distant hope of security.

  James Buchan

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• For 50 years, nuclear power stations have produced three products which only a lunatic could want: bomb-explosive plutonium, lethal radioactive waste and electricity so dear it has to be heavily subsidised. They leave to future generations the task, and most of the cost, of making safe sites that have been polluted half-way to eternity.

  James Buchan

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• Ever since the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the Muslim world has been in slow decline relative to the west. With Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the creeping British annexation of Muslim India, that decline took on a malign aspect.

  James Buchan

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James Buchan (36)

Birth:	11th June, 1954
Nationality:	Scottish
Profession:	Novelist

About

James Buchan is a Scottish novelist and journalist. He educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He began his career as a Financial Times correspondent, writing from the Middle East, Germany, and the United States. He has written several novels include: A Parish of Rich Women(won Costa First Novel Award), Davy Chadwick, Heart's Journey in Winter(won Guardian Fiction Prize), A Good Place to Die, and The gate of air(nominated for the 2009 Ondaatje Prize). His non-fiction works include: Frozen Desire, Capital of the Mind, The Authentic Adam Smith, Crowded with Genius, Jeddah Old and New, and Days of God.

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