Author

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.

From James Buchan

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.

From James Buchan

The world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation.

From James Buchan

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

From James Buchan

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.

From James Buchan

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.

From James Buchan

Economists, like royal children, are not punished for their errors.

From James Buchan

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.

From James Buchan

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.

From James Buchan

Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka.

From James Buchan

James Buchan

Notable Quotes

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