British - Novelist | June 11, 1954 -
A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.
James Buchan
TodayWaterOilHumanObscureCall
By pouring money and goods into devastated regions, foreign aid workers sometimes compound the disruption and debauch the survivors.
MoneySometimesDisruptionWorkers
Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.
SkyFinanceFinancialGoFireworks
Economists, like royal children, are not punished for their errors.
ChildrenRoyalEconomistsErrors
For 50 years, nuclear power stations have produced three products which only a lunatic could want: bomb-explosive plutonium, lethal radioactive waste and electricity so dear it has to be heavily subsidised. They leave to future generations the task, and most of the cost, of making safe sites that have been polluted half-way to eternity.
FuturePowerElectricityThreeWant
It is time to end the western policy of malign neglect. It is in the interest of the whole world to help tackle the actual grievances in Palestine, Kashmir, and in central and southern Iraq, and to help the region out of its economic backwardness.
TimeWorldEndHelpPolicyOut
Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.
BusinessCharacterDepressionGreed
Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka.
WarWorldViolenceSuicideEurope
An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
ManSupportAtheistInvisibleMeans
When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world.
WorkGreatWorldResultFairSurvey
Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.
HistoryGreatFinancialFallRailway
Whatever else it was, Adolf Hitler's short-lived regime was also a colossal industrial process by which the wealth and productive power of much of Europe was wrenched from its normal purposes and converted into a machine for killing.
PowerProcessWealthEuropeWhatever
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