Is It Really Too Much To Ask? Quotes

“This is what should be meant by people power. The power for people to choose which of the government’s petty, silly, pointless laws they want to obey. And which they don’t.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, Is It Really Too Much To Ask?

“I’ve noticed that ‘news’ is not what’s happened. It’s what’s happened on camera. If a herd of tigers runs amok in a remote Indian village, it’s not news. If a gang of wide-eyed rebels slaughters the inhabitants of a faraway African village, it’s not news. But if it’s a bit windy in America, it is news. Because in America everything that happens is recorded. I find myself wondering if last week’s Israeli raid on a Turkish ship in a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza would have had the coverage it did if the battle hadn’t been captured on film. And likewise the racing driver who broke a leg after crashing in the Indy 500. It only became a big deal because we could watch the accident from several angles in slow motion.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, Is It Really Too Much To Ask?

“To address this, we must wage a war on the militants. First, we must make it an offence, punishable by many years in jail, to ride a bicycle in anything other than what I like to call home clothes. Cycling shops selling gel for your bottom crack and outfits with padded gussets will be raided by the police and the owners prosecuted. This way, cyclists will be stripped of their uniforms and made to look like human beings.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, Is It Really Too Much To Ask?

“Do they think that, if left to our own devices, we’d all park on zebra crossings for a year? If they do, it means they don’t trust us. And if they don’t trust us, then the relationship has broken down and it’s time for some civil unrest.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, Is It Really Too Much To Ask?

“In the olden days it was easy to make a television work.You plugged an aerial cable into the back, then bashed the top with your fist until, eventually, Hughie Green stopped jumping up and down.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, Is It Really Too Much To Ask?

“I came up with the best pastime in the history of man. What you do is find an aerosol tin of spray adhesive, such as you would use to stick posters to a wall. You then lie in wait and when a wasp flies by, you leap out and give it a squirt. Bingo. One minute it’s flying; the next it’s tumbling silently out of the sky with a confused look on its stupid little face.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, Is It Really Too Much To Ask?

“reaching for the ‘Yes,”
― Jeremy Clarkson, Is It Really Too Much To Ask?

“It won’t be a volcano that ends man’s existence on this planet. It’ll be the no-win no-fee lawyers. They are the ones who brought Europe to a halt last week. They are the ones who made a simple trip from Berlin to London into a five-country, all-day hammer blow on your licence fee. They are the ones who must be stopped.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, Is It Really Too Much To Ask?

“there’s never been a safer time to go for a ride. Sadly, though, there’s a problem. You see, cycling is seen now not as something that might be exhilarating or even useful but as a frontline propaganda weapon in the war on capitalism, banking, freedom, McDonald’s, injustice, Swiss drug companies, rape and progress. Every morning London is chock-full of little individually wrapped Twiglets, their wizened faces contorted with hatred for all that they see. Fat people. Cars. Chain stores. It’s all fascism. Fascism, d’you hear? From what they see as the moral high ground, they sneer at pedestrians, howl at buses, bang on cars, scream at taxi drivers and charge through every convention that defines society with their walnutty bottoms in the air and their stupid legs going nineteen to the dozen.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, Is It Really Too Much To Ask?

“No. I suspect the reason we choose to visit a supermarket rather than flog around a town that was designed by King Alfred is that it’s so much more convenient. And that, I think, is where a solution to the problem of urban decay can be found. Realistically, we can never do anything to reverse the spread of supermarkets, but we can level the playing field. We just have to make town-centre shopping easier. And that can be achieved by getting rid of traffic wardens. Or civil enforcement officers, as they are now called.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, Is It Really Too Much To Ask?