List of John Buchan Quotes

Fortunately For Mankind The Brain In A Life Of Action Turns More To The Matter In Hand Than To Conjuring Up The Chances Of The Future.

If Those Extra-social Brains Are So Potent, Why After All Do They Effect So Little? A Dull Police-officer, With The Machine Behind Him, Can Afford To Laugh At Most Experiments In Anarchy.

You May Hear People Say That Submarines Have Done Away With The Battleship, And That Aircraft Have Annulled The Mastery Of The Sea. That Is What Our Pessimists Say. But Do You Imagine That The Clumsy Submarine Or The Fragile Aeroplane Is Really The Last Word Of Science?

Bethink You Of The Blessedness. Every Wife Is Like The Mother Of God And Has The Hope Of Bearing A Saviour Of Mankind.

Any Large-scale Organization Must Lose Some Of The Merits Of Its Rudimentary Beginnings. Quantity Will Have A Coarsening Effect On Quality.

I Once Played The Chief Part In A Rather Exciting Business Without Ever Once Budging From London . And The Joke Of It Was That The Man Who Went Out To Look For Adventure Only Saw A Bit Of The Game, And I Who Sat In My Chambers Saw It All And Pulled The Strings. 'they Also Serve Who Only Stand And Wait,' You Know.

It Was Foreordained That I Should Go Alone To Umvelos', And In The Promptings Of My Own Infallible Heart I Believed I Saw The Workings Of Omnipotence. Such Is Our Moral Arrogance, And Yet Without Such A Belief I Think That Mankind Would Have Ever Been Content To Bide Sluggishly At Home.

In Our Modern World We Have Seen Inaugurated The Reign Of A Dull Bourgeois Rationalism, Which Finds Some Inadequate Reason For All Things In Heaven And Earth And Makes A God Of Its Own Infallibility.

Civilization Is A Conspiracy. Modern Life Is The Silent Compact Of Comfortable Folk To Keep Up Pretences.

Young Girls Passed Me With Romance Still In Their Eyes, And Others, A Little Older, With The Romance Dead.

It Struck Me That Albania Was The Sort Of Place That Might Keep A Man From Yawning.

Our Sufferings Have Taught Us That No Nation Is Sufficient Unto Itself, And That Our Prosperity Depends In The Long Run, Not Upon The Failures Of Our Neighbors But Their Successes.