Quotes from Boris Johnson

The Shakespearean theatre was the product of the entrepreneurial maritime culture of the age,

Lear's daughters and their loathsome husbands are all deservedly slaughtered for their ill treatment of an aged ruler (one of the reasons that tragedy remains so huge in Asia)

Never in the field of human conflict has) So much been owed by So many to So few. If you want a classic ascending tricolon, then try his peerless line from 1942, after the victory at El Alamein. Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. When he uncorks this one at the

It was the eternal contest for reputation and prestige that encouraged Londoners to endow new hospitals or write great plays or crack the problem of longitude for the navy. No matter how agreeable your surroundings, you couldn't get famous by sitting around in some village, and that is still true today. You need people to acknowledge what you have done; you need a gallery for the applause; and above all you need to know what everyone else is up to.

Accident, agree, bagpipe, blunder, box, chant, desk, digestion, dishonest, examination, femininity, finally, funeral, horizon, increase, infect, obscure, observe, princess, scissors, superstitious, universe, village: those are just some of the everyday words that Chaucer introduced to the language through his poetry.

The beauty and riddle in studying the motives of any politician is in trying to decide what is idealism and what is self-interest; and often we are left to conclude that the answer is a mixture of the two.

These days we dimly believe that the Second World War was won with Russian blood and American money; and though that is in some ways true, it is also true that, without Churchill, Hitler would almost certainly have won.

My hero is the mayor in Jaws . He's a fantastic guy, and he keeps the beaches open, if you remember, even after it's demonstrated that his constituents have been eaten by this killer fish. Of course, he was proved catastrophically wrong in his judgment, but his instincts were right.' Boris Johnson is the mayor of London. Taken from Time Magazine interview: June 25, 2012; page 76.

When the Labour benches cheered, the Tories were still plotting to get rid of him.

Their most important contribution to civilisation is that they were both neglectful of the child.

unique understanding

He was the large protruding nail on which destiny snagged her coat.

on a stool amid his guffawing comrades, 'I stand for

The child is father to the man, and gingery young Churchill was a pretty runty sort of kid.

without Churchill, Hitler would almost certainly have won.

There must be room in our world for eccentricity, even if it offends the prudes, and room for the vague other-worldliness that often goes with genius.

we use an English word for a farm animal and a French word for the cooked meat it provides.

exiguous resources.

The Commission pressed Churchill: when did he imagine that this would be

Please help me out of this. My mother fakes being me on Phone. Greetings, Ozan Bülbül. Send someone to meet me at 3 Pm at düdüklü in 6 days, and clarify things, and getting me out of this. Im also known as "the OZ".

If ever you wanted a 12-cylinder, 6-litre entire combustible world consumer, that man is Churchill.

To a man like Roger Barlow, the whole world just seemed to be a complicated joke … everything was always up for grabs, capable of dispute; and religion, laws, principle, custom – these were nothing but sticks from the wayside to support our faltering steps.

The truth is that the history of the last couple of thousand years has been broadly repeated attempts by various people or institutions - in a Freudian way - to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe, this golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, by trying to unify it.

That is the best case for Bush; that, among other things, he liberated Iraq. It is good enough for me.