Boris Johnson famous quotes

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.
-- Boris Johnson

#Skills #Style #Moments

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.
-- Boris Johnson

#Dog #Gay #Men

I dont see why people are so snooty about Channel Five. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap-dancing, and other related and vital subjects
-- Boris Johnson

#War #Dancing #People

My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.
-- Boris Johnson

#Birthday #Cake #Dessert

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

#Pms #Mars #Olives

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.
-- Boris Johnson

#Running #Passion #Tennis

I stress – I don't believe that economic equality is possible; indeed some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.
-- Boris Johnson

#Stress #Believe #Envy

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

#Running #Ideas #Mps

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

#Done #Domesticity

I want to win and I want to be in office.
-- Boris Johnson

#Winning #Office #Want

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.
-- Boris Johnson

#Business #House #Debt

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?
-- Boris Johnson

#War #Russia #Order

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.
-- Boris Johnson

#Fun #Real #Thinking

But if people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors.
-- Boris Johnson

#Hands #People #Swim

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

#Scales

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

#Thinking #Would Be #Achieve

I think the risks that people see of terrorism are incredibly important but we are very confident we have got the right people on it and the risks have been minimised.
-- Boris Johnson

#Thinking #People #Risk

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

#Running #Jobs #Olympics

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

#Redneck #Becoming #Chance

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

#School #Eton

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.
-- Boris Johnson

#Night #Cheese #Middle

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.
-- Boris Johnson

#Good Life #Writing #Media

My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.
-- Boris Johnson

#Opportunity #Disaster

It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall.
-- Boris Johnson

#Wall #Piglet #Trying

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

#Country #Jobs #People

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

#Want #London

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

#Self #Cynical #Interest

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

#Believe #Males #Female

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

#Swimming #Jumping #Rivers

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

#Stupid #Judged

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

#Favour #Wealth #Prosperity

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

#Party #Book #Writing

We need to look at our nannying, mollycoddled, politically correct culture in my view, which stops kids from going out and playing competitive sport. I also think we need to look at the shear fatness of the regulations which control people who want to help kids play sport.
-- Boris Johnson

#Soccer #Sports #Football

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

#Bmw #Wife #Voting

The mayors fund for London will be a streamlined vehicle for getting money from the wealth creating sector to communities across London that are facing hardship and deprivation and are the victims of crime.
-- Boris Johnson

#Creating #Community #Hardship

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

#Hard Work #Promise #Easy

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

#Vacuums #Void #Empty

This is a super masticated subject, and it is time to spit it out.
-- Boris Johnson

#Spit #Scorn #Subjects

Ping-pong was invented on the dining tables of England in the 19th century, and it was called Wiff-waff! And there, I think, you have the difference between us and the rest of the world. Other nations, the French, looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner; we looked at it an saw an opportunity to play Wiff-waff.
-- Boris Johnson

#Opportunity #Thinking #Play

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.
-- Boris Johnson

#Thinking #Facts #Icing

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.
-- Boris Johnson

#Country #Running #Strong

It was the kind of blind, gulping, insensate greed that you associate with some milk-eyed creature in a volcanic fissure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench-an organism with no understanding of the existence, let alone the feelings, of other members of the ecosystem.
-- Boris Johnson

#Ecosystems #Greed #Understanding

I'm a one-nation Tory.
-- Boris Johnson

I am hoping very much to get re-elected but it is going to be a tough fight.
-- Boris Johnson

#Fighting #Tough

As a Scot Gordon Brown will find it hard to convince people in England he should be prime minister
-- Boris Johnson

#People #England #Prime

I would ban sweets from school - but this pressure to bring in healthy food is too much
-- Boris Johnson

#Sweet #School #Healthy

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

#Baby #Crisis #Essays

It just happens I write fast and always have done.
-- Boris Johnson

#Writing #Done

It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness. They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in Watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.
-- Boris Johnson

#Queens #Cheer #Fall

Nothing excites compassion, in friend and foe alike, as much as the sight of you ker-splonked on the Tarmac with your propeller buried six feet under.
-- Boris Johnson

#Compassion #Feet #Sight

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.
-- Boris Johnson

#Party #Drug #Earth

The meat in the sausage has got to be Conservative.
-- Boris Johnson

#Meat #Sausage #Conservative

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

#Drug #Lines #Remember

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

#Growth #Trying #Looks

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

#Dark #Keyboards #Intensity

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.
-- Boris Johnson

#Cycling #Law #Ubiquity

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.
-- Boris Johnson

#Country #Hands #Car

In 1904, 20 per cent of journeys were made by bicycle in London. I want to see a figure like that again. If you can't turn the clock back to 1904, what's the point of being a Conservative?
-- Boris Johnson

#Journey #Want #London

I want you to know that I have nothing against Orlando, though you are, of course, far more likely to get shot or robbed there than in London.
-- Boris Johnson

#Want #London #Orlando