Buchan Quotes & Sayings

I've been to L.A., it's horrible. Don't waste your money on the flight. — Andrew Buchan

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

A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different. — John Buchan

Civilisation is a conspiracy. — John Buchan

I had a choice: I could believe the lies of the devil, in which case I was on my way to suicide, or I could believe in the promises of God, and be taken through my time of trial. — Angus Buchan

We generally write best of what we ourselves have seen. — 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

We cannot keep the Good News to ourselves any longer! Time is running out! — Angus Buchan

And where the deepest current crawls/ Like thistledown the dainty fly falls./ Then from the depths a silver gleam/ Quick flashes, like a jewel bright./ Up through the waters of the stream/ An instant visible to sight/ As lightning cleaves to sombre sky/ A rainbow rises to the fly. — John Buchan

To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education. — John Buchan

But the big courage is the cold-blooded kind, the kind that never lets go even when you're feeling empty inside, and your blood's thin, and there's no kind of fun or profit to be had, and the trouble's not over in an hour or two but lasts for months and years. — John 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

If God is calling you to do something, do it! You can't run away from God! — Angus Buchan

The theory of permanent Muslim-Christian enmity, though it flourishes in the caves of Tora Bora and parts of the American academy, was long ago exploded by the historians. — James Buchan

I'm always fascinated by the 'who would you like to work with' question. I've never really had an answer; it only really comes as you work with them. — Andrew 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

By pouring money and goods into devastated regions, foreign aid workers sometimes compound the disruption and debauch the survivors. — James Buchan

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

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

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

Economists, like royal children, are not punished for their errors. — James Buchan

I began to get really keen, for every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective. — John Buchan

Where consumption is both conspicuous and competitive, humanity will never run out of new wishes. All the while, industry creates new desires that are marketed, in the great fashion paradox, as both novelty and need. — James Buchan

When Gordon the Brown, in London in 1997, commissioned a great inquisition or survey of his new realm, the result was the so-called national asset register, which was immediately dubbed by the boomers of the UK Treasury 'the modern Domesday Book.' — James Buchan

I spent loads of time in Scotland as a kid. My dad would take us back up to Aberdeen loads, and I have very fond memories of getting chips from his favourite chippy and heading down to the beach to eat Baskin Robbins ice cream. — Andrew Buchan

I think life's a bit of what you make it and a little smidgen of you being the jellyfish, and the tide's just gently helping you along. — Andrew Buchan

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

Because bankers measure their self-worth in money, and pay themselves a lot of it, they think they're fine fellows and don't need to explain themselves. — James Buchan

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

Bethink you of the blessedness. Every wife is like the Mother of God and has the hope of bearing a saviour of mankind. — John Buchan

Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right. — John Buchan

The good thing about having our buttons pushed is that we can no longer ignore the sensitive areas where we need to heal. — Mary Buchan

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

I was a peaceful sedentary man, a lover of a quiet life, with no appetite for perils and commotions. But I was beginning to realise that I was very obstinate. — John Buchan

Europe and North America, we are told, are less dependent on energy-intensive heavy industry than in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we squeeze more GDP out of a barrel of oil than in those benighted days. — James Buchan

The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britain's 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

Live your life above your circumstances and beyond the beliefs and behaviors that limit you — Mary Buchan

Leadership is only courage and wisdom, and a great carefulness of self. — John Buchan

There are signs that the age of petroleum has passed its zenith. Adjusted for inflation, a barrel of crude oil now sells for three times its long-run average. The large western oil companies, which cartellised the industry for much of the 20th century, are now selling more oil than they find, and are thus in the throes of liquidation. — James Buchan

Jock put his shoulder to the framework and the whole thing crumbled inward with a crash of glass.
"Rotten as touch-wood," he said. "This place would never stand a siege. — John Buchan

Any new financial order for the world must tackle the three chief challenges of our age. — James Buchan

Saudi Arabia operates according to the belief that God made young men and women so utterly and completely without self-control that they must be physically segregated every moment of the day and night. — 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

If those extra-social brains are so potent, why after all do they effect so little? A dull police-officer, with the machine behind him, can afford to laugh at most experiments in anarchy. — John Buchan

I'm an economical soul, and if I'm going to be hanged I want a good stake for my neck. — John Buchan

Our ignorance of the future has been wisely ordained of Heaven. For unless man were to be like God and know everything, it is better that he should know nothing. If he knows one fact only, instead of profiting by it he will assuredly land in the soup. — John 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 dividing line between wish and need was never clear. — James Buchan

When a man comes out of great danger, he is apt to be a little deaf to the call of duty. — John Buchan

But some love not the method of your first; Romance they count it, throw't away as dust; If I should meet with such, what should I say; Must I slight them as they slight me, or nay — John Buchan

There are about 15 million Muslims in the EU. They face ignorance, insult and even persecution. They cannot be wished away. To impose Enlightenment freedoms is self-defeating. Anyway, the Muslims have their own enlightenment. — James Buchan

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

To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you're 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

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

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation. — James Buchan

Without humility there can be no humanity. — John Buchan

The condition for a miracle is difficulty, however the condition for a great miracle is not difficulty, but impossibility. — Angus Buchan

This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man's-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life. — John Buchan

The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope. — John Buchan

In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility. — John Buchan

Those who are resilient can more quickly regain their equilibrium and spring back when they are thrown off kilter by the storms of life. — Mary Buchan

All UK nuclear power stations should be shut down without delay. — James Buchan

He felt singularly light-hearted, and the immediate cause was his safety razor. A week ago he had bought the thing in a sudden fit of enterprise, and now he shaved in five minutes, where before he had taken twenty, and no longer confronted his fellows, at least one day in three, with a countenance ludicrously mottled by sticking-plaster. — John Buchan

I had a fine prospect of the whole ring of moorland. I saw the car speed away with two occupants, and a man on a hill pony riding east. I judged they were looking for me, and I wished them joy of their quest. — John Buchan

I believe that family is closer to God's heart than anything else, the support system he has given us to build us up in faith, and to support us when we falter. If we want our family lives to conform to God's will, Jesus must be our priority, our focal point, in our home as well as in our ministries.
That doesn't mean that it's always easy to live together: home can be the hardest place to live a Christian life. That's were people see us when we're tired and our defences are down. — Angus Buchan

The more doubtful the political outlook the fiercer will be the dogmas which men create and contend for. — John Buchan

If you're going to be killed you invent some kind of flag and country to fight for, and if you survive you get to love the thing — John Buchan

You see only the productions of second-rate folk who are in a hurry to get wealth and fame. The true knowledge, the deadly knowledge, is still kept secret. But, believe me, my friend, it is there. — John Buchan

There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make Happiness. — John Buchan

Whatever else it was, Adolf Hitler's 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

Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion. — James Buchan

I shut my eyes tight in the darkness. "I believe in Jesus Christ," I said. "With God all things are possible. — Angus Buchan

We must all be fighters and strugglers, Lewie, and it is better to wear out than to rust out. It is bad to let choice things become easily familiar; for, you know, familiarity is apt to beget a proverbial offspring. The — John Buchan

What holds an Arab leader in power is a mixture of violence and prestige. Both President Assad and King Hussein were felt to have defended Arab interests against the world. That, in the end, is more important than what they wear on their head. — James Buchan

When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world. — James Buchan

I did work hard at auditions, and three years at RADA isn't like a walk in the park. And then it takes a lot of sacrifices, giving certain things up in order to audition, in order to do a play, whatever it may be. — Andrew Buchan

When I was a kid, I always had a big thing for Dannii Minogue. Initially I liked Kylie, but I quickly moved on to Dannii. There was always something more alluring about her. I think I actually wrote to her asking if we could meet. — Andrew Buchan

It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning. — John Buchan

He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly, but because he felt deeply. — John Buchan

We should not rely on our feelings; we had to walk by faith and not by sight. If we preserve in the Lord, we always succeed. — Angus Buchan

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

History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it. — John 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

It was a soft breathless June morning, with a promise of sultriness later ... — John Buchan

An old woman with a mutch sat in an arm-chair behind the counter. She looked up at me over her spectacles and smiled, and I took to her on the instant. She had the kind of old wise face that God loves. — John Buchan

The sea has formed the English character and the essential England is to be found in those who follow it. From blue waters they have learned mercifulness, and they have also learned - in the grimmest of schools - precision and resolution. The sea endures no makeshifts. If a thing is not exactly right it will be vastly wrong. — John Buchan

What would you call the highest happiness? Wratislaw was asked. The sense of competence, was the answer, given without hesitation. — John Buchan

The best prayers have often more groans than words. — John Buchan

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

Nurture your health, both inside and out. — Mary Buchan

That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it. — John Buchan

James Buchan's The Persian Bride combines a moving love story, a political thriller, and a history of modern Iran in a beautiful novel about the relationship of two people caught up in the Iranian revolution: John Pitt, a young man from England who arrives in Isfahan, Iran, in 1974, and seventeen-year-old Shirin, one of John's students, whose father is a general in the shah's army. — Nancy Pearl

I feel very privileged to have worked with a lot of outstanding actors: Alun Armstrong, Peter Mullan, Matt Smith and Andrew Garfield. — Andrew Buchan

I get into a tearing passion about something I know very little about, and when I learn more my passion ebbs away. — John Buchan

The prevailing ideology of the modern west - which is political economy - is in the doghouse. Having failed to notice atmospheric pollution, the economists then frightened themselves with the sort of financial crisis they said they had abolished. — James Buchan

A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water. — James Buchan

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

Peace is that state in which fear of any kind is unknown. — John Buchan

Viewed from a distance, or through the eye of the All-Knowing CEO of the Universe, the crash of 2008 followed the usual pattern. A long-lived boom driven by cheap credit, going back as far as 1982 (though subject to interruptions in the mid-1980s and 1990s, and in 2001), came to grief because of a rise in the cost of borrowing money. — James Buchan

By God!' he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply, 'it is all pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle. — John Buchan