Ratcliffe Quotes & Sayings

It's always been hard work for us to manufacture in the U.K. It's not a particularly profitable place for us. — Jim Ratcliffe

If you have spent your life building Ineos, and you find yourself in a crisis, you are going to do anything you can to save what you have been building. — Jim Ratcliffe

Towards the end of 2005, Ineos acquired Innovene, the petrochemicals arm of BP, for $9 billion. It quadrupled the size of Ineos overnight and brought with it some of the world's largest industrial sites. — Jim Ratcliffe

I think the U.K. would be perfectly successful as a standalone country, part of the European marketplace like Norway and Switzerland but without the expensive E.U. bureaucracy. — Jim Ratcliffe

I'm very cheerful about coming back to the U.K. We increasingly found ourselves gravitating towards London. There was so much going on for our business, and we had grown substantially here. — Jim Ratcliffe

In 1945 J.A. Ratcliffe ... suggested that I [join his group at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge] to start an investigation of the radio emission from the Sun, which had recently been discovered accidentally with radar equipment ... [B]oth Ratcliffe and Sir Lawrence Bragg, then Cavendish Professor, gave enormous support and encouragement to me. Bragg's own work on X-ray crystallography involved techniques very similar to those we were developing for "aperture synthesis", and he always showed a delighted interest in the way our work progressed. — Martin Ryle

While unions did not play a part in my family life when I was being brought up, my early years were most certainly spent in a working-class community. — Jim Ratcliffe

Unions do have a proper role in negotiating for employees and advising employees, but they have to engage with the employer. — Jim Ratcliffe

We believe Ineos is a refreshing place to work. We believe strongly in employee share ownership. — Jim Ratcliffe

It is not necessary, nor appropriate, to sow dissent and misrepresent employees or constantly to threaten industrial action. — Jim Ratcliffe

Unions can play a valuable role in large organisations where it is difficult to talk to a thousand people. They can negotiate annual pay awards with management, represent grievance cases, and explain and advise on complicated changes in employment or pension law. — Jim Ratcliffe

If you go to the U.S., you've got a huge market, cheap energy, good skills, and pensions are a sensible cost. — Jim Ratcliffe

Ineos is a friendly organisation. Very few people leave. It's collegiate. There's not much politics, and we like decent people. We don't like arrogance or bullies. — Jim Ratcliffe

What we want to see is a long term future for Grangemouth. — Jim Ratcliffe

If it's hemorrhaging cash, you've got to do something about it. You can't live with your head in the sand. — Jim Ratcliffe

You can't have an energy policy that means you can only have a bath when the wind blows. — Jim Ratcliffe

The wheels rolled on, and rolled down by the Monument, and by the Tower; and by the Docks; down by Ratcliffe, and by Rotherhithe; down by where accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher grounds, like so much moral sewage, and to be pausing until its own weight forced it over the bank and sunk it in the river. — Charles Dickens

The Brits are perfectly capable of managing the Brits and don't need Brussels telling them how to manage things. — Jim Ratcliffe

It's nice to watch television but it's even nicer when you've got a drink in your hand,' Gregory Ratcliffe, a Birmingham shopkeeper, told Reynolds News. 'Makes it more intimate somehow. Gives you the feeling that you're in a posh cabaret. — David Kynaston

Gas is by far and away the most important element of our energy policy. — Jim Ratcliffe

In America, if you are a landowner, you own the minerals vertically underneath your plot. So if there is shale, you get a share. — Jim Ratcliffe

Do your analysis of energy costs. Either it comes from windmills and solar or things like nuclear and shale gas. You have to think about how you provide competitive energy for U.K. Ltd. — Jim Ratcliffe

(First lines) Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can, for there are no trains or buses headed in that direction, though six days a week a truck from the Chuberry Turpentine Company collects mail and supplies at the nextdoor town of Paradise Chapel; occasionally a person bound for Noon City can catch a ride with the driver of the truck, Sam Ratcliffe. It's a rough trip no matter how you come, for these washboard roads will loosen up even brandnew cars pretty fast, and hitchhikers always find the going bad. Also, this is lonesome country, and here in the sunken marshes where tiger lilies bloom the size of a man's head there are luminous green logs that shine under the dark water like drowned corpses. Often the only movement on the landscape is a broken spiral of smoke from a sorry-looking farmhouse on the horizon, or a wing-stiffened bird, silent and arrow-eyed, circling endlessly over the bleak deserted pinewoods. — Truman Capote

Reacher said, "What have we missed ?"
Ratcliffe said, "A piece of the puzzle. What do you know about computers ?"
"I saw one once. — Lee Child

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila. — Mitch Ratcliffe

I'm not sure we could spell 'shale' in 2008. — Jim Ratcliffe

Washington was no politician as we understand the word," replied Ratcliffe abruptly. "He stood outside of politics. The thing couldn't be done today. The people don't like that sort of royal airs. — Henry Adams

Shale is one answer to the U.K.'s energy problem, and it has obviously worked extraordinarily well in America. — Jim Ratcliffe

The U.K. is one of the few places in the world that has final salary pensions. — Jim Ratcliffe

Be informed, also, that this good and savoury Parish is the home of Hectors, Trapanners, Biters who all go under the general appelation of Rooks. Here are all the Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Night-walkers, Whores, Linnen-lifters, who are like so many Jakes, Privies, Houses of Office, Ordures, Excrements, Easments and piles of Sir-reverence: the whores of Ratcliffe High-way smell of Tarpaulin and stinking Cod from their continuall Traffick with seamen's Breeches. There are other such wretched Objects about these ruined Lanes, all of them lamentable Instances of Vengeance. And it is not strange (as some think) how they will haunt the same Districts and will not leave off their Crimes until they are apprehended, for these Streets are their Theatre. Theft, Whoredom and Homicide peep out of the very Windows of their Souls; Lying, Perjury, Fraud, Impudence and Misery are stamped upon their very Countenances as now they walk within the Shaddowe of my Church. — Peter Ackroyd

Growing Ineos has been a lot of fun. — Jim Ratcliffe

Germany has great skill levels, great infrastructure, high-quality plant. If you go to the U.K., we're very creative, and we've got the language, but energy costs are pretty much the most expensive in the Western world; pensions are pretty expensive, and the skills are significantly below those in Germany and the U.S. — Jim Ratcliffe

I, too, like yourself was a good party man: my party was that of the Church; I was ultramontane. Your party system is one of your thefts from our Church; your National Convention is our Ecunemic Council; you abdicate reason, as we do, before its decisions; and you yourself Mr. Ratcliffe, you are a Cardinal. — Henry Adams

The U.K. is already disadvantaged on the wholesale cost of energy, and then it puts taxes on it. Anybody who's an energy user is just going to disappear. — Jim Ratcliffe

Brussels has become inefficient and very bureaucratic, which makes it slow to do things. The concept of the United States of Europe will never work. — Jim Ratcliffe

America's got quite reasonable tax rates from an employee point of view. — Jim Ratcliffe

It would be nice if areas could be revitalised - like places in the U.S. such as Pittsburgh, for example, which have been transformed through shale. There you have shiny cars in a shiny city because of the development of shale in an old industrial heartland. — Jim Ratcliffe

There was, I think, a feeling that the best science was that done in the simplest way. In experimental work, as in mathematics, there was 'style' and a result obtained with simple equipment was more elegant than one obtained with complicated apparatus, just as a mathematical proof derived neatly was better than one involving laborious calculations. Rutherford's first disintegration experiment, and Chadwick's discovery of the neutron had a 'style' that is different from that of experiments made with giant accelerators. — John Ashworth Ratcliffe

My decision to begin research in radio astronomy was influenced both by my wartime experience with electronics and antennas and by one of my teachers, Jack Ratcliffe, who had given an excellent course on electromagnetic theory during my final undergraduate year. — Antony Hewish

There's no substitute for seeing firsthand a well being drilled. — Jim Ratcliffe

Lies! Lies, all of it! Murderous thieves - there's not room for their kind of civilized society! — John Ratcliffe