Boris Johnson: Trending quotes (page 2)

“I don't see why people are so snooty about Channel 5. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap dancing, and other related and vital subjects.”

Boris Johnson

"What has the BBC come to? Toilets, that's what", Daily Telegraph, 14 March 2002, p. 29.
2000s, 2002

War , People , World , Dance

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

Boris Johnson

Daily Telegraph 26 February 2004
2000s, 2004

“Look, I wouldn't trust Harriet Harman's political judgement.”

Boris Johnson

" BBC News Video Interview http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7378792.stm", BBC News, 2nd May 2008
When told the Harriet Harman (Labour Politician) thought he had won the election for London Mayor.
2008

“And I hope that everybody who loves this city will put aside party differences to try in the making of Greater London greater still. Let's get cracking tomorrow and let's have a drink tonight.”

Boris Johnson

2000s, 2008, First Speech As London Mayor (May 3, 2008)

Love , Hope , Drink

“What we hate, what we fear, is being ignored.”

Boris Johnson

On the fears of MPs.
Source: "Labour's cleaning up on the council tax", 21 April 2005, p. 24.

Hate , Fear

“He's lost the plot, people tell me. He's drifting rudderless in the wide Sargasso Sea of New Labour's ideological vacuum.”

Boris Johnson

"Blair dead in the water? No such luck", Daily Telegraph, 29 April 2004, p. 24.
On Tony Blair.
2000s, 2004

People , Sea

“I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall, and I'd listen to this amazing crash from the greenhouse, next door, over, over in England, as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory Party, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of, of power.”

Boris Johnson

Interviewed on Desert Island Discs http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00935b6, first broadcast on 30 October 2005, about his early journalistic career working for The Times and then as Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph. In fact, rather than failing to beat another trainee to win a permanent position, he was sacked for falsifying a quotation http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6901161.stm.
2000s, 2005

Sense

“I want to thank Sian [Berry, Green Party] and Lindsey [German, Left List] and Alan [Craig, Christian Peoples Party] and Gerard [Batten, UKIP], who have sometimes joined us for hustings, but mainly I want to thank my two colleagues in the strange triumvirate who have been trundling around London's church halls and TV studios violently disputing the meaning of multiculturalism and the exact cost of conductors. On which point I think I'm going to declare victory.”

Boris Johnson

2000s, 2008, First Speech As London Mayor (May 3, 2008)

People , Thinking , Victory

“I will work flat out from now on to earn your trust and to dispel some of the myths that have been created about me.”

Boris Johnson

2000s, 2008, First Speech As London Mayor (May 3, 2008)

“The proposed ban on incitement to “religious hatred” makes no sense unless it involves a ban on the Koran itself; and that would be pretty absurd, when you consider that the Bill's intention is to fight Islamophobia.”

Boris Johnson

Daily Telegraph 21 July 2005
2000s, 2005

Sense , Fight

“Unlike the current occupant of the White House, he has no difficulty in orally extemporising a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb.”

Boris Johnson

endorsing Barack Obama, Telegraph Column, October 21, 2008
2000s, 2008

Housing

“Howard is a dynamic performer on many levels. There you are. He sent me to Liverpool. Marvellous place. Howard was the most effective Home Secretary since Peel. Hang on, was Peel Home Secretary?”

Boris Johnson

Ben Macintyre, "'Hello, I'm your MP. Actually no, I'm your candidate. Gosh'", The Times, 19 April 2005, p. 23.
On Michael Howard.
2000s, 2005

Home

“The President is a cross-eyed Texan warmonger, unelected, inarticulate, who epitomises the arrogance of American foreign policy.”

Boris Johnson

Unsigned editorial entitled "Infantile resentment" in The Spectator, 22 November 2003, p. 7.
On George W. Bush.
Attributed

“It is vital now to see this [Brexit] moment for what it is. This is not a time to quail, it is not a crisis, nor should we see it as an excuse for wobbling or self-doubt, but it is a moment for hope and ambition for Britain. A time not to fight against the tide of history, but to take that tide at the flood, and sail on to fortune.”

Boris Johnson

During the announcement that he would not run to become Britain's prime minister. A reference to Brutus's "There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune" in Julius Caesar. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/world/europe/britain-conservative-party.html (June 30, 2016)
2010s, 2016

Hope , History , Time , Fight

“I lost the job. Well the honest truth is that this has been embellished by, probably by me, in the sense that there were two of us who were taken on as trainees, and this was in the 80s, I think it was the late 80s, and it was him or me who was going to get the job at the end of, at the end of, eight months or nine months. It was mano-a-mano and of course it was him who got it.”

Boris Johnson

Interviewed on Desert Island Discs http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00935b6, first broadcast on 30 October 2005, about his early journalistic career working for The Times and then as Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph. In fact, rather than failing to beat another trainee to win a permanent position, he was sacked for falsifying a quotation http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6901161.stm.
2000s, 2005

Truth , Thinking , Sense

“Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase… Indeed, high Chinese culture and art are almost all imitative of western forms: Chinese concert pianists are technically brilliant, but brilliant at Schubert and Rachmaninov. Chinese ballerinas dance to the scores of Diaghilev. The number of Chinese Nobel prizes won on home turf is zero, although there are of course legions of bright Chinese trying to escape to Stanford and Caltech… It is hard to think of a single Chinese sport at the Olympics, compared with umpteen invented by Britain, including ping-pong, I’ll have you know, which originated at upper-class dinner tables and was first called whiff-whaff. The Chinese have a script so fiendishly complicated that they cannot produce a proper keyboard for it.”

Boris Johnson

Have I Got Views for You, p277
2000s, 2006

Art , Home , Thinking , Sport

“And when we have that drink together which we both so richly deserve, I hope we can discover a way in which the mayoralty can continue to benefit from your transparent love of London, a city whose energy conquered the world and which now brings the world together in one city.”

Boris Johnson

2000s, 2008, First Speech As London Mayor (May 3, 2008)

Love , World , Hope , Way

“Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix, and stay conscious.”

Boris Johnson

Beth Pearson, "Has Howard got news for Boris?", The Herald (Glasgow), 13 November 2004, p. 15.
Explaining why he quit after a week as a management consultant.
2000s, 2004

“And as for those who voted for me, I know there will be many whose pencils hovered for an instant before putting an X in my box and I will work flat out to repay and to justify your confidence.”

Boris Johnson

Source: 2000s, 2008, First Speech As London Mayor (May 3, 2008)

Confidence , Box

“The Lib Dems are not just empty. They are a void within a vacuum surrounded by a vast inanition.”

Boris Johnson

"The least said about Lib Dems, the better", Daily Telegraph, 25 September 2003, p. 24.
2000s, 2003