London Quotes

“London is—after Athens and Rome—the third most influential city in history.”
― Boris Johnson, Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World

“It was the eternal contest for reputation and prestige that encouraged Londoners to endow new hospitals or write great plays or crack the problem of longitude for the navy. No matter how agreeable your surroundings, you couldn’t get famous by sitting around in some village, and that is still true today. You need people to acknowledge what you have done; you need a gallery for the applause; and above all you need to know what everyone else is up to.”
― Boris Johnson, Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World

“Lear’s daughters and their loathsome husbands are all deservedly slaughtered for their ill treatment of an aged ruler (one of the reasons that tragedy remains so huge in Asia)”
― Boris Johnson, Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World

“The Shakespearean theatre was the product of the entrepreneurial maritime culture of the age,”
― Boris Johnson, Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World

“Accident, agree, bagpipe, blunder, box, chant, desk, digestion, dishonest, examination, femininity, finally, funeral, horizon, increase, infect, obscure, observe, princess, scissors, superstitious, universe, village: those are just some of the everyday words that Chaucer introduced to the language through his poetry.”
― Boris Johnson, Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World

“Cybele, or the Great Mother—Magna Mater. This Cybele was supposed to have conceived a passion for a young man named Atys, and when Atys failed to respond to her advances, she became jealous. When she caught him having it off with someone else, she drove him so mad that he castrated himself. I am afraid that respectable young Londoners had celebrated their devotion to Magna Mater by doing the same—and we know this for sure because the river near London Bridge has also yielded a fearful set of serrated forceps, adorned with the heads of Eastern divinities.”
― Boris Johnson, Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World

“we use an English word for a farm animal and a French word for the cooked meat it provides.”
― Boris Johnson, Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World