Boris Johnson Quotes

I lead a life of blameless domesticity and always have done.

Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.

I'm made up of immigrant stock. I went to a primary school in London. I grew up eating Spangles, why shouldn't I be as well placed to speak for Londoners as anyone else?

Dark forces dragged me away from the keyboard, swirling forces of irresistible intensity and power.

I do think human beings cannot be faulted for wishing to judge themselves and their lives and their achievements by others around them; that is a natural human feeling.

Humanity would have plunged into a new dark age of absolutely frightening and appalling characteristics without Churchill.

I think it's absolutely amazing and how the Remain side have the cheek to come and tell us that we improve our security by staying in this organisation I do not understand.

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

I suppose with houses and assets, then I guess I would be a millionaire. But so are a lot of people.

I'd like thousands of schools as good as the one I went to, Eton.

This is our chance to build a Britain where everyone benefits from the success of the economy.

The Geiger-counter of Olympomania is going to go zoink off the scale,

My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.

Lear's daughters and their loathsome husbands are all deservedly slaughtered for their ill treatment of an aged ruler (one of the reasons that tragedy remains so huge in Asia)

Cybele, or the Great Mother - Magna Mater. This Cybele was supposed to have conceived a passion for a young man named Atys, and when Atys failed to respond to her advances, she became jealous. When she caught him having it off with someone else, she drove him so mad that he castrated himself. I am afraid that respectable young Londoners had celebrated their devotion to Magna Mater by doing the same - and we know this for sure because the river near London Bridge has also yielded a fearful set of serrated forceps, adorned with the heads of Eastern divinities.

These days we dimly believe that the Second World War was won with Russian blood and American money; and though that is in some ways true, it is also true that, without Churchill, Hitler would almost certainly have won.

This is not a time to quail, it is not a crisis, nor should we see it as an excuse for self-doubt. It is a moment of hope.

First Lord of the Admiralty, long enough to engineer what an anti-Churchillian would say was an epic and unparalleled military disaster - a feat of incompetent generalship that made the Charge of the Light Brigade look positively slick. It was an attempt to outflank the stalemate on the Western Front that not only ended in humiliation for the British armed forces; it cost the lives of so many Australians and New Zealanders that to this day their 1915 expedition to Turkey is the number-one source of pom-bashing and general anti-British feeling among Antipodeans.

Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity. It has been said that the difference between Hitler's speeches and Churchill's speeches was that Hitler made you think he could do anything; Churchill made you think you could do anything.

It is easy to make promises - it is hard work to keep them.

My hero is the mayor in Jaws. He's a fantastic guy, and he keeps the beaches open, if you remember, even after it's demonstrated that his constituents have been eaten by this killer fish. Of course, he was proved catastrophically wrong in his judgment, but his instincts were right.'
Boris Johnson is the mayor of London.
Taken from Time Magazine interview: June 25, 2012; page 76.

I'm a one-nation Tory.

I'm in politics to change things - if possible, for the better. I was a journalist for a long time, but I had a kind of midlife crisis, and I decided I needed to do something to get on the pitch and stop endlessly kicking over other peoples' sandcastles.

The meat in the sausage has got to be Conservative.

Some people think that it [Brexit] is the end of the world. It's not. On the contrary, it's a massive opportunity for this country.

I believe in immigration. But I feel people think it would be better if there was an Australian-style points based system so we could actually get a good system.

It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time.

You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth - and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth - and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere.

My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg.

There's an idea that London is a planet on its own: that it's starting to diverge from the rest of the solar system. We need to combat that.

We need to remember that we can't compete endlessly with other nations that set their income taxes substantially lower than ours. They will attract jobs, and investment. They may generate more tax - and they may even persuade their tennis champs to run that extra half yard

If gay marriage was OK ... then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men; or indeed three men and a dog.

I've got more in common with a three-toed sloth than I have with Winston Churchill. There is no easy comparison with any modern politician. The more you read about him, the more completely amazed you are about what he did - his energy, his literary fecundity, his ability to work - just unbelievable energy.

Volunteering is also now more crucial than ever in helping people find work.

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.

Churchill decides from very early on that he will create a political position that is somehow above left and right, embodying the best points of both sides and thereby incarnating the will of the nation. He thinks of himself as a gigantic keystone in the arch, with all the lesser stones logically induced to support his position. He has a kind of semi-ideology to go with it - a leftish Toryism: imperialist, romantic, but on the side of the working man.

Remind me: who was the greater mass murderer, Stalin or Hitler? Well, Stalin is thought to have been responsible for about 50 million deaths, and Hitler for a mere 25 million. What Hitler did in his concentration camps was equalled if not exceeded in foulness by the Soviet gulags, forced starvation and pogroms. What makes the achievements of communist Russia so special and different, that you can simper around in a CCCP T-shirt, while anyone demented enough to wear anything commemorating the Third Reich would be speedily banged away under the 1986 Public Order Act?

Some people play the piano, some do Sudoku, some watch television, some people go out to dinner parties. I write books.

He is like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver at roulette, and who now decides to double up by betting the house as well.

on a stool amid his guffawing comrades, 'I stand for

I firmly believe that volunteering is good for our society and brings communities together. It's a fantastic opportunity to get involved in your local community, to meet new people and to gain a sense of pride and achievement.

I want London to be a competitive, dynamic place to come to work.

You are part of our Great British family.

The key thing is to be "Conservative in principle but Liberal in sympathy".

Augustine said he wept more for the death of Dido than he did for the death of his own saviour. What about Book Four, the best book of the best poem of the best poet?

There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.

Our friends in America will be at the front of the queue for trade deals.

Life isn't like coursework, baby. It's one damn essay crisis after another.

What I really think about Banksy is I think he's a genius; he's a great artist, and I like his stuff. But he's got to accept it if, from time to time, someone will need to paint over his work.

Since January 1993 there have been 27 other countries not in the EU that have done better than the UK at exporting goods into the single market.

I am supporting David Cameron purely out of cynical self-interest.

The euro has become a means by which superior German productivity is able to gain an absolutely unbeatable advantage over the whole eurozone territory.

I have not been more robust towards female rather than male assembly members and I do not believe I have been remotely sexist.

I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally gone mad ... he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help.

Never in my life did I think I would be congratulated by Mick Jagger for achieving anything.

When lorry drivers come up behind me and I'm cycling, innocently keeping to my side of the road, and they decide because they are so big, and their lorry is so powerful, and they just want to clear me out of the road, and they hoot aggressively, then I do see red a bit. I do.

London is a fantastic creator of jobs - but many of these jobs are going to people who don't originate in this country.

If I'd been on the Remain side I would have tried to have seen the best in Europe and tried to explain that. Instead, what they've done is endlessly try and talk up what they see as the weaknesses of Britain and they aren't there. That's a total mistake.

When Cameron's Conservatives come to power it will be a golden age for cyclists and an Elysium of cycle lanes, bike racks, and sharia law for bike thieves. And I hope that cycling in London will become almost Chinese in its ubiquity.

I want to win and I want to be in office.

He is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces. The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference.

I have as much chance of becoming Prime Minister as of being decapitated by a frisbee or of finding Elvis.

We celebrate the contribution of people who have come to this country to make it better.

The job of mayor of London is unbelievably taxing, particularly in the run-up to the Olympics.

I love swimming in rivers, and well remember once jumping in at Chiswick.

If we get outside the EU, if we leave the EU system, we will be relieved of a huge amount of unnecessary regulation that is holding this country back. We will be able to set our own priorities, make our own laws and set our own tax policies to suit the needs of this country. We have a huge opportunity also to make people's votes count for more.

If we judged everybody by the stupid, unguarded things they blurt out to their nearest and dearest, then we wouldn't ever get anywhere.

We did everything we could to break down barriers that restrain poorest.

The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP they have run out of better ideas.

I'm not one of those people who believes in going endlessly around finger wagging and ticking people off for occasional colourful use of language.

[People] are woefully underestimating this country and what it can achieve.

There is absolutely no one, apart from yourself, who can prevent you, in the middle of the night, from sneaking down to tidy up the edges of that hunk of cheese at the back of the fridge.

All the people I talk to, increasingly, can see that the emperor has got no clothes. The case for leaving [the EU] is now overwhelming.

I cant remember what my line on drugs is. Whats my line on drugs?

The Shakespearean theatre was the product of the entrepreneurial maritime culture of the age,

The Remain campaign ... I've never seen a more miserable offering. All they are saying is stay in and we'll do our best to make sure that Britain's Parliamentary independence isn't eroded faster than we can possibly imagine.

My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.

Yes, cannabis is dangerous, but no more than other perfectly legal drugs. It's time for a rethink, and the Tory party - the funkiest, most jiving party on Earth - is where it's happening.

London is the most commercially important city in Europe, and it's the most populous city. It should be for the whole of the European continent what New York is to America. That's what it should be.

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

I want London to be the most cycle-friendly city on Earth, and I want more people to be happy and safe on bicycles.

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

My ideal world is, we're there, we're in the EU, trying to make it better.

I've always sort of thought that politics was a high and noble calling and a good thing to do.

The next Tory leader would have to unify his party and ensure that Britain stood tall in the world.

The crucial thing is to look in an informed way at what's going on. Look at the way in which we are forced by our imbalanced system to push away people who might contribute mightily to the NHS.

London is - after Athens and Rome - the third most influential city in history.

My point is that this Potter business has legs. It will run and run, and we must be utterly mad, as a country, to leave it to the Americans to make money from a great British invention. I appeal to the children of this country and to their Potter-fiend parents to write to Warner Bros and Universal, and perhaps, even, to the great J K herself. Bring Harry home to Britain - and if you want a site with less rainfall than Rome, with excellent public transport, and strong connections to Harry Potter, I have just the place.

So I'm definitely in favour of stimulating the dynamic wealth creation sectors of the economy.

unique understanding

I love tennis with a passion. I challenged Boris Becker to a match once and he said he was up for it but he never called back. I bet I could make him run around.

It would be a sad day if we British stopped being cynical, but you sometimes wonder whether we overdo it.

It's not reasonable for companies that have chief executives and board members who are paid very considerable sums to subsidise low pay through in-work benefits.

I think it'd be disgraceful if a chap wasn't allowed to have a bit of fun in Las Vegas. The real scandal would be if you went all the way to Las Vegas and you didn't misbehave in some trivial way.