J Buchan Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wise men never grow up; indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth. — John 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

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

Without humility there can be no humanity. — 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