Simon Hoggart Quotes

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Simon Hoggart

Profession : Journalist

Birth : May 26, 1946

When you visit a foreign city you are in it, but not of it, separated by a glass wall. Once, while a student, I was getting dressed in my ground-floor room when a family of Italians crossed the grass to watch, as if I were laid on for their amusement and instruction.

Simon Hoggart

I cannot be alone in being pretty nauseated by Red Nose Day, or at least its television manifestation. Do I think that wretchedly poor children in Africa should get food and life-saving drugs? Of course. Do I want to be hectored into contributing by celebrities who earn more in a 10-minute slot than many of these families get in a year? Nope.

Simon Hoggart

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.

Simon Hoggart

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

Simon Hoggart

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?

Simon Hoggart

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.

Simon Hoggart

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.

Simon Hoggart

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.

Simon Hoggart

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.

Simon Hoggart

I think the great thing about grandparents is seeing another home, realising that people you love can have different priorities, different diversions, different opinions and lead quite different lives from the ones you see every day, and that is immensely valuable.

Simon Hoggart

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.

Simon Hoggart

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.

Simon Hoggart

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.

Simon Hoggart

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.

Simon Hoggart

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?'

Simon Hoggart

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.

Simon Hoggart

All over the U.S. there are people whose lives are being destroyed for lack of proper health care provision, and there is no sight more odious than the rich, powerful and arrogant trying to keep it that way.

Simon Hoggart

I think Tony Blair has to come down on one side or the other. You can't be a half-hearted supporter of the possible attack on Iraq. You're either with George Bush or you're against him.

Simon Hoggart

'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.

Simon Hoggart

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.

Simon Hoggart