Top 90 Boris Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is easy to make promises – it is hard work to keep them.”

— Boris Johnson

2. “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.”

— Boris Johnson

3. “My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.”

— Boris Johnson

4. “I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed so it didn’t go up my nose. In fact, it may have been icing sugar.”

— Boris Johnson

5. “I firmly believe that volunteering is good for our society and brings communities together. It’s a fantastic opportunity to get involved in your local community, to meet new people and to gain a sense of pride and achievement.”

— Boris Johnson

6. “I’m a one-nation Tory.”

— Boris Johnson

7. “Dark forces dragged me away from the keyboard, swirling forces of irresistible intensity and power.”

— Boris Johnson

8. “We should celebrate immigrants and everything they do for our country.”

— Boris Johnson

9. “Volunteering is also now more crucial than ever in helping people find work.”

— Boris Johnson

10. “Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity. It has been said that the difference between Hitler’s speeches and Churchill’s speeches was that Hitler made you think he could do anything; Churchill made you think you could do anything.”

— Boris Johnson

11. “My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.”

— Boris Johnson

12. “There is absolutely no one, apart from yourself, who can prevent you, in the middle of the night, from sneaking down to tidy up the edges of that hunk of cheese at the back of the fridge.”

— Boris Johnson

13. “There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.”

— Boris Johnson

14. “Yes, cannabis is dangerous, but no more than other perfectly legal drugs. It’s time for a rethink, and the Tory party – the funkiest, most jiving party on Earth – is where it’s happening.”

— Boris Johnson

15. “My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg.”

— Boris Johnson

16. “The meat in the sausage has got to be Conservative.”

— Boris Johnson

17. “I love swimming in rivers, and well remember once jumping in at Chiswick.”

— Boris Johnson

18. “I’d like thousands of schools as good as the one I went to, Eton.”

— Boris Johnson

19. “It was the eternal contest for reputation and prestige that encouraged Londoners to endow new hospitals or write great plays or crack the problem of longitude for the navy. No matter how agreeable your surroundings, you couldn’t get famous by sitting around in some village, and that is still true today. You need people to acknowledge what you have done; you need a gallery for the applause; and above all you need to know what everyone else is up to.”

— Boris Johnson

20. “This is a super masticated subject, and it is time to spit it out.”

— Boris Johnson

21. “It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall.”

— Boris Johnson

22. “Never in my life did I think I would be congratulated by Mick Jagger for achieving anything.”

— Boris Johnson

23. “In 1904, 20 per cent of journeys were made by bicycle in London. I want to see a figure like that again. If you can’t turn the clock back to 1904, what’s the point of being a Conservative?”

— Boris Johnson

24. “I have as much chance of becoming Prime Minister as of being decapitated by a frisbee or of finding Elvis.”

— Boris Johnson

25. “My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.”

— Boris Johnson

26. “London is the sporting capital of the world. I say to the Chinese and I say to the world, ping pong is coming home.”

— Boris Johnson

27. “Life isn’t like coursework, baby. It’s one damn essay crisis after another.”

— Boris Johnson

28. “Some people play the piano, some do Sudoku, some watch television, some people go out to dinner parties. I write books.”

— Boris Johnson

29. “I stress – I don’t believe that economic equality is possible; indeed some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.”

— Boris Johnson

30. “Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix and stay conscious.”

— Boris Johnson

31. “I lead a life of blameless domesticity and always have done.”

— Boris Johnson

32. “The beauty and riddle in studying the motives of any politician is in trying to decide what is idealism and what is self-interest; and often we are left to conclude that the answer is a mixture of the two.”

— Boris Johnson

33. “He is like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver at roulette, and who now decides to double up by betting the house as well.”

— Boris Johnson

34. “My ideal world is, we’re there, we’re in the EU, trying to make it better.”

— Boris Johnson

35. “It hasn’t taken them long, they began by telling us they would have a positive and patriotic case and they’re back to project fear within minutes. There they go again they have nothing positive to say.”

— Boris Johnson

36. “I think it’d be disgraceful if a chap wasn’t allowed to have a bit of fun in Las Vegas. The real scandal would be if you went all the way to Las Vegas and you didn’t misbehave in some trivial way.”

— Boris Johnson

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37. “The volunteering spirit of Londoners is part of what makes this the best big city on earth.”

— Boris Johnson

38. “I love tennis with a passion. I challenged Boris Becker to a match once and he said he was up for it but he never called back. I bet I could make him run around.”

— Boris Johnson

39. “When Cameron’s Conservatives come to power it will be a golden age for cyclists and an Elysium of cycle lanes, bike racks, and sharia law for bike thieves. And I hope that cycling in London will become almost Chinese in its ubiquity.”

— Boris Johnson

40. “The crucial thing is to look in an informed way at what’s going on. Look at the way in which we are forced by our imbalanced system to push away people who might contribute mightily to the NHS.”

— Boris Johnson

41. “I want to win and I want to be in office.”

— Boris Johnson

42. “Nothing excites compassion, in friend and foe alike, as much as the sight of you ker-splonked on the Tarmac with your propeller buried six feet under.”

— Boris Johnson

43. “But if people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors.”

— Boris Johnson

44. “Augustine said he wept more for the death of Dido than he did for the death of his own saviour. What about Book Four, the best book of the best poem of the best poet?”

— Boris Johnson

45. “London is a fantastic creator of jobs – but many of these jobs are going to people who don’t originate in this country.”

— Boris Johnson

46. “If we judged everybody by the stupid, unguarded things they blurt out to their nearest and dearest, then we wouldn’t ever get anywhere.”

— Boris Johnson

47. “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”

— Boris Johnson

48. “I have not been more robust towards female rather than male assembly members and I do not believe I have been remotely sexist.”

— Boris Johnson

49. “I’m afraid Sadiq Khan is completely wrong. The European Court of Justice is the supreme legal authority in our country.”

— Boris Johnson

50. “Do you seriously propose that they are going to be so insane as to allow tariffs to be imposed. The EU is, I’m afraid a job destroying engine. You can see it all across southern Europe, you can see it, alas, in our country.”

— Boris Johnson