“There are signs that the age of petroleum has passed its zenith. Adjusted for inflation, a barrel of crude oil now sells for three times its long-run average. The large western oil companies, which cartellised the industry for much of the 20th century, are now selling more oil than they find, and are thus in the throes of liquidation.”
— James Buchan
Author: James Buchan
Category: age
Tags: age, James Buchan
“The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags.”
— James Buchan
Author: James Buchan
Category: history
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“Rarely in modern times has there been such a revolution in commercial sentiment as occurred in 2008, or such a display in government and business of panic and helplessness.”
— James Buchan
Author: James Buchan
Category: government
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“Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.”
— James Buchan
Author: James Buchan
Category: science
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“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.”
— James Buchan
Author: James Buchan
Category: business
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“For all their current prestige, Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers are still regarded in all but the most desperate districts of Gaza or Peshawar as romantics with little chance of more than symbolic victories, however bloody and brutal. That gives both the Middle East and the West a small and distant hope of security.”
— James Buchan
Author: James Buchan
Category: hope
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“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.”
— James Buchan
Author: James Buchan
Category: power
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“The world dominion of western thought, forms of organisation, technology and military force is not God-given, nor eternal, nor greatly appreciated by the rest of the world.”
— James Buchan
Author: James Buchan
Category: technology
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“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.”
— James Buchan
Author: James Buchan
Category: war
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“To give money to a woman – and here I must speak as a man – is to deny her special quality, her irreplaceability, and reduce her unique amiability to a commodity. Money takes away her name, while transforming her lover into a nameless customer of a market of appetites.”
— James Buchan
Author: James Buchan
Category: money
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“Since the attack on the United States on September 11 2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, there must be few people who have not felt a twinge of nostalgia for the cold war.”
— James Buchan
Author: James Buchan
Category: war
Tags: war, James Buchan