James Buchan Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.”

“Losing your capital is like losing your trousers. It is a real humiliation, and one not to be soon repeated.”

“We generally write best of what we ourselves have seen.”