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distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.
P.G. Wodehouse
    Norway, too, has noble wild prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England.
Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
    Of course I want political autonomy but not cultural autonomy. You just have to watch the Scottish Baftas to want to kill yourself.
Muriel Gray
    I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obligated to desist from the experiment in despair.
Charles Lamb
    His sayings are generally like women’s letters; all the pith is in the postscript.
William Hazlitt on Charles Lamb
    The Scotchman is one who keeps the Sabbath and every other thing he can lay his hands on.
Lyndon Johnson
    It raises the average IQ of both countries.
Robert Muldoon, Prime Minister of New Zealand, commenting on an exodus of New Zealanders emigrating to Australia
    Acquaintances seemed to steer slap through his consciousness and were gone with the wind.
D.H. Lawrence comparing the Australian mind with the Flying Dutchman
    Pass a law to give every single whingeing bloody Pommie his fare home to England. Back to the smoke and the sun shining ten days a year and shit in the streets. Yer can have it.
Thomas Keneally, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
    I find it hard to say, because when I was there it seemed to be shut.
Clement Freud on being asked his opinion of New Zealand
    You must remember that the Australian voter has a short memory span … less than fourteen days in most cases.
John Howard, Australian Prime Minister
    Frustrate a Frenchman, he will drink himself to death; an Irishman, he will die of angry hypertension; a Dane, he will shoot himself; an American, he will get drunk, shoot you, then establish a million dollar aid programme for your relatives. Then he will die of an ulcer.
Stanley Rudin
    American intellectuals became afraid to collect their thoughts lest they be accused of unlawful assembly.
Historian Charles Beard on McCarthyite hysteria in America
    The English approach to ideas is not to kill them but to let them die of neglect.
Jeremy Paxman
    England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.
George Orwell
    The English think of an opinion as something which a decentperson, if he has the misfortune to have one, does all he can to hide.
Margaret Halsey, American writer
    Canada is useful only to provide me with furs.
Madame de Pompadour after the fall of Quebec
    The gloomy region, where the year is divided into one day and one night, lies entirely outside the stream of history.
W.W. Reade on Canada, 1872
    Canada is a country built against any common, geographical, historic or cultural sense.
Pierre Trudeau, Canadian Prime Minister
    I don’t even know what street Canada is on.
Al Capone
    A country the size of a piece of snot.
Chen Tan-Sun, Taiwanese Foreign Minister, on Singapore
    In China, when you’re one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.
Bill Gates
    The general level of intelligence of the Thais is rather low, a good deal lower than ours and much lower than that of the Chinese.
Sir Anthony Rumbold, British ambassador to Thailand
    Decayed garbage left for months on the side of the roads; stagnant canals that serve both as cesspools and as the dumping ground for dead dogs; buses and lorries that belch uncontrolled clouds of diesel fumes; scarcely a pavement without potholes and open manholes to break the legs of the unwary; bag-snatchers in every block; assault and violence a way of life; prostitution and every form of natural and unnatural vice on a scale astonishing even in Asia; a city of 4 million with only one park, and that littered with refuse and infested with thieves; unplanned hideous ribbon development; no proper drainage, so that in the rainy season large areas of the city