Quotes from Boris Johnson

It would be a sad day if we British stopped being cynical, but you sometimes wonder whether we overdo it.

Some people play the piano, some do Sudoku, some watch television, some people go out to dinner parties. I write books.

It just happens I write fast and always have done.

It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time. But in the end you have a great sense of personal dissatisfaction.

I always believe writing is an indispensable part of one's political armoury.

I am hoping very much to get re-elected but it is going to be a tough fight.

Times have been tough, the economy has been tough. But I want to bring forward a fantastic manifesto for taking the city forwards.

I have not been more robust towards female rather than male assembly members and I do not believe I have been remotely sexist.

One thing you have got to do politically is to identify the ties that bind society together and try to strengthen them.

When lorry drivers come up behind me and I'm cycling, innocently keeping to my side of the road, and they decide because they are so big, and their lorry is so powerful, and they just want to clear me out of the road, and they hoot aggressively, then I do see red a bit. I do.

But if people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors.

Oh what a wanker I am the greatest wanker of 'em all!

Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity. It has been said that the difference between Hitler's speeches and Churchill's speeches was that Hitler made you think he could do anything; Churchill made you think you could do anything.

I want you to know that I have nothing against Orlando, though you are, of course, far more likely to get shot or robbed there than in London.

The key thing is to be "Conservative in principle but Liberal in sympathy".

There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.

He is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces. The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference.

London is—after Athens and Rome—the third most influential city in history.

David Lloyd George had been to Germany, and been so dazzled by the Führer that he compared him to George Washington. Hitler was a 'born leader', declared the befuddled former British Prime Minister. He wished that Britain had 'a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today'. This from the hero of the First World War! The man who had led Britain to victory over the Kaiser!

Take the one about the time he was sitting next to a clean-living Methodist bishop—at a reception, allegedly, in Canada—when a good-looking young waitress came up and offered them both a glass of sherry from a tray. Churchill took one. But the bishop said, 'Young lady, I would rather commit adultery than take an intoxicating beverage.' At which point Churchill beckoned the girl, and said, 'Come back, lassie, I didn't know we had a choice.

Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism—that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous.

Augustine said he wept more for the death of Dido than he did for the death of his own saviour. What about Book Four, the best book of the best poem of the best poet?

There was one thing the public could say for certain about Churchill: that there was nothing that he was going to ask the British armed forces to do that he would not have done himself.

Churchill decides from very early on that he will create a political position that is somehow above left and right, embodying the best points of both sides and thereby incarnating the will of the nation. He thinks of himself as a gigantic keystone in the arch, with all the lesser stones logically induced to support his position. He has a kind of semi-ideology to go with it—a leftish Toryism: imperialist, romantic, but on the side of the working man.