Quotes from Jeremy Paxman

Why are we in this mess, now facing the prospect of economic armageddon? It's because the prevailing characteristic has been greed, and it doesn't matter whether it's individuals living beyond their means or governments living beyond their means or people seeking to get rich quick.

At work people are expected to be at the beck and call of employers all the time. You have blackberries and other things, and they just don't leave you alone. People have less time just to drop into an art gallery.

The cure for cynicism is simply to engage honestly.

The defining problem of contemporary television is trust: Can you believe what you see on television, does television treat people fairly, is it healthy for society?

The English approach to ideas is not to kill them, but to let them die of neglect.

It seems to me that the way to remove people's cynicism is, when asked a straight question, to give a straight answer.

I find it odd that people take me seriously.

I've always felt myself to be an outsider. I've always felt awkward.

instead of trying to grapple with the implications of the story of empire, the British seem to have decided just to ignore it... the most corrosive part of this amnesia is a sense that because the nation is not what it was, it can never be anything again.

What does it say about your society that it admits only those who do not care very much to belong? For a start, it suggests that the English don't much care to be liked. They prefer the company of other misanthropes. Since no misanthrope worth the name would actually want to join a club, eager applicants must be snubbed.

In Ralph Waldo Emerson's 'English Traits' I came across a meteorological explanation of the Englishman's character. 'Born in a harsh and wet climate, which keeps him indoors whenever he is at rest,' he writes, 'domesticity is the taproot which enables the nation to branch wide and high. The motive and end of their trade is to guard the independence and privacy of their homes.'9 I wondered whether the English weather might really be the key.

The silly slogan used for selling this new country was 'Cool Britannia', at which any truly cool person could only wince or shudder: when middle-aged politicians embrace youth culture they always get it wrong.

There was a general tendency to ascribe almost any irregular or bad behaviour to the French. [...] A tonsil-tickling embrace is still known as a French kiss, as if somehow it would never have occurred to an English person to stick their tongue into another person's mouth if the French hadn't invented it.

No one thought it odd that at her funeral Elton John should perform a reworking of the song he had originally composed as hero-worship to Marilyn Monroe, for she too was an icon for a secular age and in the end icons of that kind are interchangeable.

The Seven Years War of 1756–63 has often been considered the first 'world war'. It certainly shares its European origins with the First and Second World Wars. But it might also be considered the point at which the British recognized the extent to which their destiny lay not in Europe but elsewhere.

Everything human … has its period: nations, like mortal men, advance only to decline; dismembered empire and diminished glory mark a crisis in the constitution;

The doctor begins his seduction with the classic English gambit of commenting on the weather.

It takes some believing, but it was not until 1869 that Emily Davies founded Girton as a Cambridge college for women, and when, in 1896, the university came to vote on whether women should be allowed to face examinations for degrees, The Times printed train timetables, to enable London-based graduates to travel to Cambridge to vote against the proposition. The university did not allow women full membership until 1948.

I had been particularly taken by a scene in The Old Country where Hilary, the spy who has defected to Moscow, muses about England: 'We're conceived in irony. We float in it from the womb. It's the amniotic fluid. It's the silver sea. It's the waters at their priest-like task, washing away guilt and purpose and responsibility. Joking but not joking. Caring but not caring. Serious but not serious.

in fact, as a woman, I have no country

If you are Pakistani or Indian you might just as well commit suicide when the team is humiliated; if you're West Indian, you might feel the world has fallen apart when things go wrong at the Oval. But these are countries where cricket is one of the leading suppliers of national pride. In England, you don't support cricket teams, you follow them. It's the game you support, not the team.

The animosity in the English terms reflects a bizarre schizophrenia about the French people.

But to most of the English, their history is just that, history. The contrast is with Scotland or Ireland, where every self-respecting adult considers themselves to belong to an unbroken tradition stretching back to the wearing of woad: oppressed peoples remember their history.

But they were not in any meaningful sense religious, the Church of England being a political invention which had elevated being 'a good chap' to something akin to canonization.