Auberon Waugh Quotations

Looking back at all the people I have insulted, I am mildly surprised that I am still allowed to exist.

Generally speaking, the best people nowadays go into journalism, the second best into business, the rubbish into politics and the shits into law

Anyone in England who puts himself forward to be elected to a position of political power is almost bound to be socially or emotionally insecure, or criminally motivated, or mad.

The main objection to killing people as a punishment...is that killing people is wrong

Now that Mandela has been released from prison we can all admit what has been apparent, that he is not a Tembu tribesman, in fact he is not an African at all. He is quite obviously Chinese. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it makes those who persist in seeing him as a great African statesman look rather foolish.

There is an old story about the boy at Eton who committed suicide. The other boys in his house were gathered together and asked if any of them could suggest a reason for the tragedy. After a long silence a small boy in the front put up his hand: 'Could it have been the food, sir?

Better to go than sit around being a terrible old bore.

I remember also speaking to a reporter on Gay News who enquired about my attitude to Gay Dogs and reassuring him of my compassionate attitude to homosexuality among dogs, while secretly feeling they ought to be whipped.

Anyone wishing to communicate with Americans should do so by e-mail, which has been specially invented for the purpose, involving neither physical proximity nor speech.

History, having destroyed the religion as the opium of the people, now requires that they be given a taste of the real stuff.

Judicial execution can never cancel or remove the atrocity it seeks to punish; it can only add a second atrocity to the original one ... So long as one sees killing as wrong there is no need to waste time with the deterrent argument, since it would be nonsense to try to prevent a theoretical evil in the future by perpetrating an actual one in the present.

An unemployed electrician,whom I had been taunting with my reminder of how much richer I was, leaned forward and said:'What are your qualifications? I know exactly what your qualifications are.You bent over in the shower to pick up some soap at Eton and Harrow, like all the rest of them.

Strange how much simple wisdom there is to be found in the deformed head and unprepossessing carcase of your typical London cabbie.

Anyone might become homosexual after seeing Glenda Jackson naked.

In England, we have a curious institution called the Church of England. Its strength has always been in the fact that on any moral or political issue it can produce such a wide divergence of opinion that nobody -- from the Pope to Mao Tse-tung -- can say with any confidence that he is not an Anglican. Its weaknesses are that nobody pays much attention to it and very few people attend its functions.

There are many Welsh who are taciturn, truthful, well formed, open minded, handsome and peaceful, even if no particular individual immediately springs to mind.

The two sides of industry have traditionally always regarded each other in Britain with the greatest possible loathing, mistrust and contempt. They are both absolutely right.

You should tell the truth as often as you can, but in such a way as people don't believe you or think that you're being funny.

Politics, as I never tire of saying, is for social and emotional misfits, handicapped folk, those with a grudge. The purpose of politics is to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power.

In their quest for power and self-importance, to compensate for whatever feelings of social inadequacy or sexual insecurity, they (Politicians)are prepared to perpetrate something which is hard to distinguish from mass murder if they think they can get away with it...

Unless people are prepared to declare themselves your enemies you have to hunt around for them.

When Glenda Jackson reveals that she has never been in a relationship with a man in which he hasn't raised his fists to her, I don't know whether this tells us more about the contemporary male or about Glenda Jackson.

There are countless horrible things happening all over the world and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible.

Politicians can forgive almost anything in the way of abuse; they can forgive subversion, revolution, being contradicted, exposed as liars, even ridiculed, but they can never forgive being ignored.

It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled.

The urge to pass new laws must be seen as an illness, not much different from the urge to bite old women. Anyone suspected of suffering from it should either be treated with the appropriate pills or, if it is too late for that, elected to parliament [or congress, as the case may be] and paid a huge salary with endless holidays, to do nothing whatever.

We journalists like to think we are the new crusaders-it's much more gratifying than the image of the journalist pigs evoked by Spitting Image puppets.