Top 25 Simon Hoggart Quotes

In Washington, success is just a training course for failure.

My colleague Bill Keegan has written a very short book (‘Saving the World?’) on an unlikely topic – he is the first economist to try to rehabilitate Gordon Brown.

I’ve been intrigued by ‘Le Monde’ ever since work took me to Paris once, and I noted that on a day when there was some huge worldwide story, the paper led its front page on some cabinet changes in Turkey. It implied a magnificent disdain for the quotidian folderol of mere news.

I’ve served on five different juries, and many of them were bonkers in their own way.

What puzzles me is the way that some of the smaller, unknown chateaux imagine that because Chinese millionaires pay ludicrous sums for the great names, they can overcharge for their own inferior fluids. There is no trickledown effect in wine prices.

There are few tribes more loathsome than the American Right, and their vicious use of the shortcomings in the NHS to attack Barack Obama‘s attempts at health reform are a useful reminder.

To be fair to the Inquisition, they only used confessions extracted after the torture had ended, which let them claim that admissions had been freely given; the fact that the torture would have started again if they hadn’t confessed was a minor detail.

A married vicar is likely to regard his vocation as a job – a tough and ill-paid one, to be sure – but a priest is seen as a pillar of the community, answerable only to his parishioners and his God, rather than to a wife and children.

I also learned to play Fruit Ninja on an iPad. It is quite hypnotic, and I hope one day to get past 100 points. I remembered that David Cameron admits to being an addict. I wonder if it helps him in his work. ‘Great, just destroyed a pineapple! Reminds me, shall we send those grenades to the Syrian rebels?’

Every time humanists try to get a slot on ‘Thought For the Day’ on Radio 4, they are told it’s reserved for ‘the faith community,’ whatever that is. Yet ‘TfT’ is almost always pabulum about how God wants us all to love each other and care for the unfortunate. I’m sure humanists would say much the same, without God.

Living in New York is like being at some terrible late-night party. You’re tired, you‘ve had a headache since you arrived, but you can’t leave because then you’d miss the party.

Corney & Barrow are proud to have the royal warrant, meaning that they provide the Palace with some of the greatest – and necessarily most expensive – wines from around the world. I am pleased to say that they also hold my own warrant, for providing exceptional wines at – surprisingly – modest prices.

Jim Sheridan, the MP who wants to ban sketchwriters from the Commons for being rude about politicians, is a blithering idiot. Sorry, scrub that – clearly a very thoughtful person with whom I might conceivably disagree on some marginal issues. A blithering savant, perhaps.

Americans are fascinated by their own love of shopping. This does not make them unique. It’s just that they have more to buy than most other people on the planet. And it’s also an affirmation of faith in their country.

If you read the ‘Daily Mail,’ you would imagine that the British middle classes lead lives of unremitting misery.

What has always puzzled me is the flexibility of God’s word. For instance, Catholics can now eat meat on Fridays. And limbo has been abolished. How does this work? Who tells them?

One of the pleasures of staying with friends is that you get to browse their shelves. I always arrive with a book, but I almost never read it. It would be like sitting at their dinner table and opening a packet of sandwiches.

We all have our opinions. But I suspect that writers are actually less worth heeding, because they regard themselves as so uniquely important, so culturally sensitive.

Remember how Margaret Thatcher came to believe that abroad was more important than at home? Didn’t do her much good.

Most successful American politicians look well-fed on endorsements, campaign contributions and chicken dinners.

I know of no wars started by anyone to impose lack of religion on someone else. We have lethal Sunni v Shia, Catholic against Protestant, but no agnostic suicide bombers attack crowded atheist pubs.

While it is entirely untrue that Canadians lack a sense of humour, the funniest ones tend to head south: Dan Aykroyd, Jim Carrey, Michael J. Fox.

‘Sir‘ Richard Branson may be the Julian Assange of British business, in that both believe the world revolves around them. Hence Branson’s decision to set up an air service between Manchester and London, above the route of the train line that’s been taken from him.

The Chinese do make vast quantities of wine for home consumption, but you wouldn’t want to drink it yourself.

When people move from one extreme set of views to embrace another equally batty picture of the world, they expect us to applaud their choice, as if the fact that they have rejected one form of nuttiness somehow validates the screwball views they hold now.