Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Portillo
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British journalist Michael Portillo.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
Three letters send a chill down the spine of the enemy: SAS. Those letters spell out one clear message. Don't mess with Britain!
My own father was a refugee from the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, later going on to become a BBC radio producer after World War II.
In any family, the joy of a wedding must be tinged with a little anxiety. So many marriages fail. Luckily, people often get over such traumas. But for the Royal Family, marriages carry the gravest dangers.
The true symbolism of every facet of 'Guernica' can only be guessed at, but we do know that it haunted Picasso.
If a prince marries a foreign princess, one to the manner born, he is being snobbish and old-fashioned. If he chooses a Diana or a Fergie, glamorous outsiders, they may never adapt to the restrictions of being Royal, with calamitous results.
My Scottish grandfather, John W. Blyth, was a man addicted to paintings. A manufacturer of linen, he spent all his surplus money on pictures.
If the Tories and Lib Dems fought together, they'd keep their ministerial offices and limousines, and continue to do the right things for the U.K. But too many backbenchers in both parties yearn for Opposition, preferring hallucinogenic ideological purity and political irrelevance to the mucky reality of governing.
Some people are born to trains, and some have trains thrust upon them. Fortunately, I can be included in this latter category.
Conservatives are wary of change. We have respect for things that have lasted a long time and have been proved to work. When things need changing, we should make the changes with respect to all the reasons why those things worked originally as well as the reasons why amendment is necessary.
I can never thoroughly appreciate meals on ships because, away from land, I feel my autonomy is restricted.
What's extraordinary about Cobra Mist, and so much of what went on at Orford, was that the public were completely oblivious to it.
My eyes are at different levels, and my right ear's a bit bigger than my left - which showed up particularly in school photographs - so my mother used to call me her 'little Picasso.'
My grandfather, who was always keen to promote living artists, staged an unprecedented exhibition of Peploe's works at Kirkcaldy in 1928.
I love a good meal on a train, and if I'm travelling on a discount ticket, the challenge is to eat more than the price of the fare.
Freedom matters.
Of all the places I've visited in my life, Egypt has been the most fascinating. I've explored almost the whole country: Cairo and the Pyramids, Alexandria, the temples of Luxor and Karnak, the Valleys of the Kings and the Queens and the Nobles.
Were we ever to find ourselves living under a totalitarian regime, place no faith in the mercy of your fellow citizens.
What is it about trains that makes food taste so good? Some of my happiest memories are of prolonged lunches between St. Moritz and Zurich, Bordeaux and Paris, and even between Coimbra and Salamanca.
I'm nothing to do with the Conservative Party; I'm not a member of the Conservative Party. I stopped being a member shortly after I stopped being a member of Parliament and I took up a career as a broadcaster.
I don't know why, but I think the eating of food is hugely enhanced when you do it on a train. Even a simple steak and chips, when the world is rushing past outside, can take you to heaven.
For good or ill, communism transformed the globe, but how many of us realise the crucial role played by a Manchester public library - Chethams, the oldest library in the English-speaking world - in the honing of that ideology?
I'm vain.
Ask anyone where they were when they heard of Diana's death, and they won't hesitate, because nobody can forget. Along with 9/11, it remains the most poleaxeing public event, news so shocking it made me shake, and drove everything else from my mind for days.
I do rather rejoice when people come up to talk to me about railways.
Anyone, they say, is entitled to change his mind. Not about the defence of Britain, you're not. You either feel it in your heart, in your bones, in your gut, or you don't.
If, like me, you're interested in history, Egypt is a place of wonders. It's the land of many civilisations, including Greek, Roman, Christian, and Muslim.
The late 1960s was another time and another world.
It's a dilemma for every modern parent - how to keep children safe on social media without monitoring their every post.
British-built railways in India helped the British to make money and maintain order; but, as a by-product, they served to unite the country, making it ripe for independence.
I'm a man with a great political future behind me.
If you are a fan of my BBC series 'Great Continental Railway Journeys,' you'll probably not be surprised to learn that one of my great aspirations is to travel on Egypt's railways.
Like so many other grammar schools that flourished in Britain before they were abolished through a mix of ideology and political folly, Harrow County was a fiercely competitive institution, where all boys were taught to strive for excellence. It was precisely because of this demanding regime that results were so good.
Television brings with it two dangerous hazards: the worship of celebrity and the blurring of reality and fantasy.
Pablo Picasso first entered my consciousness when I was a boy of about eight years old.
One enjoyable consequence of being in the Scouts was that, at the start of each new school year, we had to camp out in tents on the school playing fields.
One of the reasons that Thatcher promoted home ownership is that it promoted responsible citizens with a stake in society. But another reason was that those people would tend to be Conservative.
I am better at politics than I am at anything else.
A wood carving of Quixote on his nag Rocinante graced my childhood home.
A vocation is a noble thing and not to be subverted by the whims of politicians.
Before my teens, my contemporaries were reading Tolkien and were absorbed by his works, but try as I might, I could not be drawn in, perhaps as something in me resists the epic, medieval-feeling fantasy.
Politics hasn't changed, but I've changed.
The truth is a good thing.
In some of the estates, there are generations of people who have been without work, so the environment and the example passed down generations is the normality of being without work.
Music turns the world upside down.
I have liked trains since I was a boy, although I was never a train-spotter.
I have Spanish ancestry and, indeed, speak the language, up to a point.
For all those who experienced it, the Spanish Civil War was devastating.
No restaurant, however brilliantly situated, can give you the constantly changing views that you can see from a railway. Revolving restaurants at the tops of tall buildings try to compete, but spinning around is no substitute for speeding along.
Here in Britain, we can get a little bit snobby about American history. Yes, their history is not quite as long as ours. But it isn't all that short, either.
Again and again, people get more conservative as they get older.
America, to me, is this enormous contrast between the heady idealism of founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, who said, 'All men are created equal,' and the reality that he was himself a slave owner.
Non-fictionalised accounts of horrific accidents, bereavement, and the outrages of officialdom tend to move us deeply.
Oppositions usually say ridiculous things and must embarrassingly then ditch untenable positions.
I look back on my schooldays with a warm glow of nostalgia.
As a politician, I spent a lot of time in Washington and New York, cities that are familiar to Europeans.
It's not as if I've ever been to prison or been close to going to prison. The closest I've got is knowing people who have been in jail - after all, I was a member of Parliament - and visiting them there during their sentence.
You never quite know what you do in life that leaves a seed behind that grows into an oak tree.
Leaving politics was a good thing. I was spared a miserable Tory government where I might have ended up as leader.
King Edward VIII was forced to abdicate because he was determined to marry a divorced woman. As a result of that decision, the Queen's father, George VI, was obliged to lead the country through a war that threatened its survival, with all the personal pain portrayed in 'The King's Speech.'
Personal responsibility matters.
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