Simon Jenkins Quotes

#1. All students of disaster movies know that nothing survives these natural onslaughts except cats and the highest paid film stars.

Simon Jenkins

#2. The British countryside is threatened by people and interests who really do not care for it

Simon Jenkins

#3. The contemporary Matthew Paris wrote that, 'foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the foulness of King John'. A bard sang that 'no man may ever trust him, for his heart is soft and cowardly'. Yet this evil was catalyst for a greater good, Magna Carta.

Simon Jenkins

#4. An Englishman's car is his castle on wheels.

Simon Jenkins

#5. The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment.

Simon Jenkins

#6. Without history we are infants. Ask what binds the British Isles more closely to America than to Europe and only history gives a reply. Of all intellectual pursuits, history is the most supremely useful. That is why people crave it and need ever more of it.

Simon Jenkins

#7. The (U.K.) government's thesis that the countryside of upland and coastal Britain is 'worth sacrificing to save the planet' is an insult to science, economics and politics. But the greatest insult is to aesthetics. The trouble is that aesthetics has no way of answering back.

Simon Jenkins

#8. If grownups want to dress in Tudor costume, douse babies in water, intone over the dead and do strange things with wine and wafers, it is a free country. But for a Christian sect to claim ownership of the legal definition of a human relationship is way out of order.

Simon Jenkins