Boris Johnson: Quotes about thinking

“This has been a marathon election as you can tell with a record turnout and I think it has been good for politics and it has been good for London.”

Boris Johnson

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

Thinking

“And as for Ken, Mayor Livingstone, I think you have been a very considerable public servant and a distinguished leader of this city.”

Boris Johnson

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

Thinking

“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 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 I can tell you that your courage and the sheer exuberant nerve with which you stuck it to your enemies, especially in New Labour, you have thereby earned the thanks and admiration of millions of Londoners, even if you think that they have a funny way of showing it today.”

Boris Johnson

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

Way , Courage , Thinking

“The excitement is growing so much I think the Geiger counter of Olympo-mania is going to go zoink off the scale.”

Boris Johnson

2010s, 2012
Source: On the forthcoming London Olympic Games. Daily Telegraph, 27 July 2012.

Thinking

“Had it been us staging the Games, I don't think we would necessarily have done the switcheroo with the girl with the braces”

Boris Johnson

" Boris Johnson In Beijing http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2008/aug/21/boris.politicsandsport?gusrc=rss&feed=politics", The Guardian, 21 August 2008

When asked whether he had any criticisms of the Beijing Olympic Games.
2000s, 2008

Girl , Game , Thinking

“But here's old Ken - he's been crass, he's been insensitive and thuggish and brutal in his language - but I don't think actually if you read what he said, although it was extraordinary and rude, I don't think he was actually anti-Semitic.”

Boris Johnson

"Quotes of the Day", The Times, 18 February 2005, p. 2.
2000s, 2005

Thinking , Reading

“I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed so it didn't go up my nose. In fact, it may have been icing sugar.”

Boris Johnson

"Londoner's Diary", Evening Standard, 17 October 2005, p. 15.
2000s, 2005

Thinking

“You look at the plan to increase the efforts to prop up the single currency with an ever denser system of integration, with more and more regulation about all sorts of social and economic issues which will impact directly on this country, I think the risk is increasingly in staying in the project. I think the best thing we can do is show a lead, show an example and strike out for freedom.”

Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson: EU exit 'win-win for us all' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-35783049, BBC News, 11 March 2016
2010s, 2016

Effort , Thinking , Country , Freedom

“I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you will be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands. People obviously can make up their own minds but I think the scientific evidence is… our judgement is that washing your hands is the crucial thing.”

Boris Johnson

At a press conference, as quoted in U.K. Leader Boris Johnson Boasts He Has Shaken Hands With Coronavirus Patients https://www.newsweek.com/boris-johnson-says-shaken-hands-coronavirus-patients-1490214 by Khaleda Rahman, 3 March 2020, Newsweek.
2020s, 2020

Thinking , Making love , Night , People

“At this stage I do not think that the international comparisons and the data are yet there to draw the conclusions that we want.”

Boris Johnson

Prime Minister's Questions https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2020-05-06/debates/FD4CE89E-F564-4D9F-B396-59684C404BB8/PrimeMinister (6 May 2020)
2020s, 2020

Drawing , Thinking

“I do think they [the EU] understand there's an opportunity to do a deal. I think it's going to be touch and go.”

Boris Johnson

2010s, 2019
Source: Brexit: Johnson accused of ‘gaslighting’ voters amid claims he offered nothing new in EU meeting https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-deal-boris-johnson-donald-tusk-meeting-g7-summit-a9078646.html (26 August 2019)

Understanding , Thinking

“There's a terrible kind of collaboration as it were, going on between people who think they can block Brexit in Parliament and our European friends.”

Boris Johnson

Source: Boris Johnson: Brexit opponents 'collaborating' with EU https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49348072 BBC News (14 August 2019)

People , Thinking