Top 100 Buchan Quotes
#1. Buchan had discovered a wealth of small tidbits. He now knew her first name - Tatiana. Like Shakespeare's fairy queen. Be she but little, she is fierce.
Karen Hawkins
#2. The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
Alan Bennett
#3. WPC Buchan might not know much about art, but she knew what gave her the fucking willies, and these things took the hairy biscuit.
Stuart MacBride
#4. When a man comes out of great danger, he is apt to be a little deaf to the call of duty.
John Buchan
#5. At the heart of banking is a suicidal strategy. Banks take money from the public or each other on call, skim it for their own reward and then lock the rest up in volatile, insecure and illiquid loans that at times they cannot redeem without public aid.
James Buchan
#6. Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history; and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing.
James Buchan
#7. It was a strange staging for death, for the woman on the high bed was dying. Slowly, fighting every inch of the way with a grim tenacity, but indubitably dying. Her vital ardour had sunk below the mark from which it could rise again, and was now ebbing as water runs from a little crack in a pitcher.
John Buchan
#8. I spent loads of time in Scotland as a kid. My dad would take us back up to Aberdeen loads, and I have very fond memories of getting chips from his favourite chippy and heading down to the beach to eat Baskin Robbins ice cream.
Andrew Buchan
#9. (Thirty-nine steps)' was the phrase; and at its last time of use it ran - '(Thirty-nine steps, I counted them - high tide 10.17 p.m.)'. I could make nothing of that.
John Buchan
#10. One day I was driving down the farm track in the pickup,with two of the little boys, aged about four or five, sitting beside me. One of them turned to me conversationally and said, "Baba, don't worry. When you get old one day you'll be sitting here where we are, and we'll be driving you around!
Angus Buchan
#11. There are about 15 million Muslims in the EU. They face ignorance, insult and even persecution. They cannot be wished away. To impose Enlightenment freedoms is self-defeating. Anyway, the Muslims have their own enlightenment.
James Buchan
#12. The prevailing ideology of the modern west - which is political economy - is in the doghouse. Having failed to notice atmospheric pollution, the economists then frightened themselves with the sort of financial crisis they said they had abolished.
James Buchan
#13. If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.
James Buchan
#14. To spend your days on such work when the world is chockful of amusing things. Life goes roaring by and you only hear the echo in your stuffy rooms.
John Buchan
#15. It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.
John Buchan
#16. I get into a tearing passion about something I know very little about, and when I learn more my passion ebbs away.
John Buchan
#17. We cannot keep the Good News to ourselves any longer! Time is running out!
Angus Buchan
#18. Very little gets offered to me. I have to audition and bawl my eyes out. For 'Broadchurch,' the scene was Danny lying on the mortuary table. I can't remember the last audition I had where I didn't come out drenched in sweat, puffy-eyed.
Andrew Buchan
#19. We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
John Buchan
#20. Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.
James Buchan
#21. Leadership is only courage and wisdom, and a great carefulness of self.
John Buchan
#23. If God is calling you to do something, do it! You can't run away from God!
Angus Buchan
#24. The jellyfish doesn't actively move anywhere - it's just moved with the tides. Is that what man is? Man's just the jellyfish: stuff happens to you, and you get twisted in different directions.
Andrew Buchan
#25. The aircraft that blew up the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington conveyed several messages to the world, of which one of the least remarked is this: the Muslims of the world are suffering.
James Buchan
#26. I would be content with any job, however thankless, in any quarter, however remote, if I had the chance of making a corner of the desert blossom and a solitary place glad.
John Buchan
#27. We read too much Shakespeare at school, and view our parliamentary politics as dynastic drama, in which an impatient crown prince frets at his long subordination and begins to scheme for the throne he knows he merits, was promised and has earned.
James Buchan
#28. My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences.
James Buchan
#29. The great disadvantage of getting older is to be obliged to relive the salient economic events of one's youth, with nothing learned and nothing forgotten.
James Buchan
#30. I began to get really keen, for every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.
John Buchan
#31. Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader.
James Buchan
#32. Liberty in Islam is the liberty to be a Muslim, democracy likewise, individualism likewise.
James Buchan
#33. The Church of Christ is an anvil which has worn out many hammers. Our opponents may boast of their strength, but they do not realize what they have challenged.
John Buchan
#34. Profits in business always depend on the rate of interest: the higher the interest, the higher the rate of profit required.
James Buchan
#35. There is power in prayer. When men work, they work. but when men pray, God works.
Angus Buchan
#36. Ever since the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the Muslim world has been in slow decline relative to the west. With Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the creeping British annexation of Muslim India, that decline took on a malign aspect.
James Buchan
#37. Live your life above your circumstances and beyond the beliefs and behaviors that limit you
Mary Buchan
#38. When you are thankful in all things, all of a sudden it's a new day!
Angus Buchan
#39. Without humility there can be no humanity.
John Buchan
#41. The book trade is a spiritual barometer of a nations well-being.
John Buchan
#42. Even before he came to power in 1997, Gordon Brown promised to change the accounts to parliament from simple litanies of cash in and cash out, to a more commercial system that took notice of the public property the departments were using. This system is known as resource accounting.
James Buchan
#43. The dividing line between wish and need was never clear.
James Buchan
#44. Civilisation needs more than the law to hold it together. You see, all mankind are not equally willing to accept as divine justice what is called human law.
John Buchan
#45. Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.
James Buchan
#46. To get Over iT, we must get real, go deep, and live beyond ourselves.
Mary Buchan
#47. That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.
John Buchan
#48. Any new financial order for the world must tackle the three chief challenges of our age.
James Buchan
#49. Whatever else it was, Adolf Hitler's short-lived regime was also a colossal industrial process by which the wealth and productive power of much of Europe was wrenched from its normal purposes and converted into a machine for killing.
James Buchan
#50. Life without oil, in fact, would be so different that it is frightening to contemplate. We are addicted, and it is no comfortable addiction.
James Buchan
#51. Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.
James Buchan
#52. Nurture your health, both inside and out.
Mary Buchan
#53. To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.
John Buchan
#54. He who would valiant be against all disaster; let him in constancy follow the Master. There's no discouragement shall make him once relent; his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim.
John Buchan
#55. [W]ithout humour you cannot run a sweetie-shop, let alone a nation.
John Buchan
#56. We generally write best of what we ourselves have seen.
James Buchan
#57. Last chances in the Middle East have been two a dirham since the 1950s. Each year the enmities are more profound, the despots more bloodthirsty and clownish, the violence more extreme, and the conditions of ordinary existence more ghastly.
James Buchan
#58. Peace is that state in which fear of any kind is unknown.
John Buchan
#59. The robe of flesh wears thin, and with the years God shines through all things.
John Buchan
#60. Initially, it was my dream to get into RADA. Then I got in. So it became my dream to show them I wasn't half bad at acting.
Andrew Buchan
#61. Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born revolutionary who is believed by most Arab and Iranian observers to be the inspiration of the attacks in New York and Washington, is the best known of the Islamic militants to have emerged in the past 20 years and the least difficult to fathom.
James Buchan
#62. It is wonderful how much news there is when people write every other day; if they wait for a month, there is nothing that seems worth telling.
Anna Buchan
#63. The theory of permanent Muslim-Christian enmity, though it flourishes in the caves of Tora Bora and parts of the American academy, was long ago exploded by the historians.
James Buchan
#64. Rarely in modern times has there been such a revolution in commercial sentiment as occurred in 2008, or such a display in government and business of panic and helplessness.
James Buchan
#65. London is like the tropical bush
if you don't exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in.
John Buchan
#66. The secret belongs only to the Maker of good and faithful dogs.
John Buchan
#67. Saudi Arabia operates according to the belief that God made young men and women so utterly and completely without self-control that they must be physically segregated every moment of the day and night.
James Buchan
#68. I dropped my head into my arms. I could hear the sea vibrating, the tiny hiss of displaced sand and the click of stones. If I lay still and quiet enough, I thought, I could melt into this elemental world of sun, water and wide, open horizon.
Elizabeth Buchan
#69. Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.
James Buchan
#70. I believe that every man has in his soul a passion for treasure-hunting, which will often drive a coward into prodigies of valour.
John Buchan
#71. What holds an Arab leader in power is a mixture of violence and prestige. Both President Assad and King Hussein were felt to have defended Arab interests against the world. That, in the end, is more important than what they wear on their head.
James Buchan
#72. The world dominion of western thought, forms of organisation, technology and military force is not God-given, nor eternal, nor greatly appreciated by the rest of the world.
James Buchan
#73. The best prayers have often more groans than words.
John Buchan
#74. One of the admirable features of British novelists is that they have no scruple about setting their stories in foreign settings with wholly foreign personnel.
James Buchan
#75. I was a peaceful sedentary man, a lover of a quiet life, with no appetite for perils and commotions. But I was beginning to realise that I was very obstinate.
John Buchan
#76. If you're going to be killed you invent some kind of flag and country to fight for, and if you survive you get to love the thing
John Buchan
#77. History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it.
John Buchan
#78. A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different.
John Buchan
#79. Since the attack on the United States on September 11 2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, there must be few people who have not felt a twinge of nostalgia for the cold war.
James Buchan
#80. Was it possible to find recompense, meaning, connection with others amidst the mess and the muddle ?
Elizabeth Buchan
#81. Wise men never grow up; indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth.
John Buchan
#82. I'm not a booky actor, I don't go away and do loads of reading up on a part, generally. I'm more interested in what the people we're portraying do physically, and looking at their sentence construction.
Andrew Buchan
#83. What would you call the highest happiness? Wratislaw was asked. The sense of competence, was the answer, given without hesitation.
John Buchan
#84. The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags.
James Buchan
#85. Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.
James Buchan
#86. An old woman with a mutch sat in an arm-chair behind the counter. She looked up at me over her spectacles and smiled, and I took to her on the instant. She had the kind of old wise face that God loves.
John Buchan
#87. Our ignorance of the future has been wisely ordained of Heaven. For unless man were to be like God and know everything, it is better that he should know nothing. If he knows one fact only, instead of profiting by it he will assuredly land in the soup.
John Buchan
#88. It was a soft breathless June morning, with a promise of sultriness later ...
John Buchan
#89. The more doubtful the political outlook the fiercer will be the dogmas which men create and contend for.
John Buchan
#90. I always try to suit my clothes to my company. It is the only way to be inconspicuous.
John Buchan
#91. It is time to end the western policy of malign neglect. It is in the interest of the whole world to help tackle the actual grievances in Palestine, Kashmir, and in central and southern Iraq, and to help the region out of its economic backwardness.
James Buchan
#92. Where consumption is both conspicuous and competitive, humanity will never run out of new wishes. All the while, industry creates new desires that are marketed, in the great fashion paradox, as both novelty and need.
James Buchan
#93. We should not rely on our feelings; we had to walk by faith and not by sight. If we preserve in the Lord, we always succeed.
Angus Buchan
#94. Here were we wretched creatures of men making for each other's throats, and outraging the good earth which God had made so fair a habitation.
John Buchan
#95. I'm an economical soul, and if I'm going to be hanged I want a good stake for my neck.
John Buchan
#96. By God!' he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply, 'it is all pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.
John Buchan
#97. I wondered whether the scientific modern brain could not get to the stage of realising that Space is not an empty homogeneous medium, but full of intricate differences, intelligible and real, though not with our common reality.
John Buchan
#98. I did work hard at auditions, and three years at RADA isn't like a walk in the park. And then it takes a lot of sacrifices, giving certain things up in order to audition, in order to do a play, whatever it may be.
Andrew Buchan
#99. Were there peace and justice in the Middle East, the Arabs would no more need their tinhorn dictators than they would their corpulent princes.
James Buchan
#100. When I was a kid, I always had a big thing for Dannii Minogue. Initially I liked Kylie, but I quickly moved on to Dannii. There was always something more alluring about her. I think I actually wrote to her asking if we could meet.
Andrew Buchan
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