Quotes from Jeremy Paxman

Scepticism is a necessary and vital part of the journalist's toolkit. But when scepticism becomes cynicism it can close off thought and block the search for truth.

The early bird may get the worm, but its the second mouse that gets the cheese.

Watching TV is the most popular leisure activity in Britain. I find that very depressing.

Television bosses should stop insulting the public's intelligence by assuming we are all idiots.

There is a deep social contract with tolerance and an instinctive distrust of cleverness or eloquence. If the Lord God came to England and started expounding his beliefs, you know what they'd say? They'd say 'Oh, come off it!

Above all, the system had prized integrity above intellect; 'learning and cultivation of the mind come last, character, heart, courage, strength and physical address are in the first rank'.

Riding is about bending it to your will, and public riding is to demonstrate that authority.

Churchill once explained... 'a great battle is lost: parliament turns out the Government. A great battle is won- crowds cheer the Queen.

Politically, kings became figures of no importance. Yet those that survived possessed a quality which politicians can peruse for years and still never acquire. They had the vital attribute of legitimacy because they occupied a role they had never striven for- one, furthermore, which would continue when they and their prime ministers were long gone.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only being uncomfortable. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Man and Superman

The central difficulty for royalty when it comes to political matters is that they are somehow expected to be in the world and yet not of it, to speak for their people and yet to have nothing to say until someone writes it for them. To be, in short, an empty vessel.

But what is perhaps most curious about the English experience is the way in which a belief that they had been chosen by God could have produced a version of religion so temporizing, pliable and undogmatic. After all, orthodox Judaism, which is built upon the assertion that the Jews are the chosen people, is one of the most demanding, prescriptive religions on earth. But there is scarcely anything prescriptive about the Church of England.

The most striking characteristic is the combination of slavish devotion and intellectual condescension... they are grander than we are and yet they are also subservient to us.

The central conundrum of the new mass-media age could be summarised as to how to retain a distance while appearing intimate- for distance without intimacy nourishes public hostility, while intimacy without distance destroys respect.

The most characteristic English statement about belief is 'Well, I'm not particularly religious', faintly embarrassed by the suggestion that there might be something more to life. It sometimes seems the Church of England thinks God is just the ultimate 'good chap'.

They keep the position of head of state out of the hands of those who want it just to gratify their ambition.

Small wonder that so many English writers have preferred the dramatic certainties of Catholicism. You simply couldn't write a novel like Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory about a church built on the conviction that anything can be settled over a cup of tea.

The sons of those who had survived the horrors of the trenches were marching off to war again, singing, There'll always be an England While there's a country lane, Wherever there's a cottage small Beside a field of grain.

But Faiers had decided that you didn't have to be English to be 'English'. 'The actor James Stewart, for example, he was American, but he had Englishness. He didn't brag about himself. He wasn't pushy. He had one wife all his life. You could trust him with your wallet. That's English.

How else can one explain the survival of so much that is so utterly pointless – barristers' wigs, bearskins, an unelected House of Lords, flummeries from the Trooping the Colour to Swan-upping, or archaic-sounding offices of state like Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster or Warden of the Cinque Ports? In the end, it gets to everyone: those who start their adulthood in passionate argument for modernization end up dreaming of a seat in the House of Lords.

It followed that if a man was to maintain his position, the woman of the house could not be seen to go out to work. (One consequence of the need to preserve the appearance of prosperity on one income was that the husband and father figure was obliged to work longer and longer hours to earn the means to keep the family afloat, becoming in the process the distant, cold figure of caricature.)

The idea of a tax on the ownership of a television belongs in the 1950s. Why not tax people for owning a washing machine to fund the manufacture of Persil?

I've always thought you have to live life looking forwards, not backwards. I've had no interest at all in who my ancestors are.

I've spent my whole life being told I have a face like a horse. You are just what you are, aren't you?