Top 40 Evan Davis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you’re not making some mistakes, it probably means you’re not trying hard enough.”

— Evan Davis

2. “It’s not a bad idea to occasionally spend a little time thinking about things you take for granted. Plain everyday things.”

— Evan Davis

3. “Someday we’ll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car.”

— Evan Davis

4. “There is a strong link between the following three things: exporting, manufacturing and the degree of saving by the population. It’s complicated, but if the population doesn’t save, the economy will not tend to export as much, and if it doesn’t export as much, it won’t manufacture enough.”

— Evan Davis

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5. “It is no wonder that bank capital is regulated. When borrowing and lending is profitable, it is tempting for banks to scale up their operations and to borrow and lend too much in relation to their capital, in effect reducing the effectiveness of the potential capital cushion.”

— Evan Davis

6. “Nice guys finish last, but we get to sleep in.”

— Evan Davis

7. “But sometimes it’s good to dare yourself to do the unthinkable. And rather than stand in front of an audience with no clothes on, I decided to have a go at stand-up comedy.”

— Evan Davis

8. “Black Friday is not another bad hair day in Wall Street. It’s the term used by American retailers to describe the day after the Thanksgiving Holiday, seen as the semi-official start of Christmas shopping season.”

— Evan Davis

9. “In principle, there are only three main components of spending that much matter to monetary policy: consumer spending, business investment and exports and trade.”

— Evan Davis

10. “Personally, I don’t see old economics and behavioural economics as opposed. It is useful to assume people are rational as a good approximation to their long term behaviour, but it would be unwise not to think how in practice their behaviour may deviate from that simplifying assumption.”

— Evan Davis

11. “Crossrail is a prime example of infrastructure. It is a rather deadly word, but I think it is exciting stuff, the civil engineering which makes Britain tick – the bridges, tunnels, power and water networks, which bind us together.”

— Evan Davis

12. “But beginners to the World Economics Forum have to understand there is no single Davos experience, and there is no single Davos community either. There are numerous tribes who interact only at a minimal level.”

— Evan Davis

13. “For years, we’ve grown dependant on American consumers as the world’s spenders of last resort. They’ve kept Europe out of recession, allowed China to industrialise, and prevented global deflation. But at the same time, they’ve not been looking after their own futures.”

— Evan Davis

14. “Interest rate cuts have an effect in stimulating an economy by directly or indirectly making someone, somewhere, spend more than they otherwise would. That extra spending increases demand and ensures that we all carry on with work to do, without us having to slash our prices or our wrists.”

— Evan Davis

15. “Interestingly, human irrationality is a hot topic in economics at the moment. Behavioural economics it’s called, on the cusp of economics and psychology.”

— Evan Davis

16. “When a population saves a lot, the funds are invested outside the country as well as inside. If the Japanese invest in the United States, it pushes their exchange rate down and makes their manufacturing more competitive.”

— Evan Davis

17. “The two questions that anyone ever asks me are: ‘Are house prices going to go down?’ and ‘Is it a good time to fix my mortgage rate?’”

— Evan Davis

18. “Although being economics editor sounds impressive, it does not mean I actually edit anything. It mainly reflects two decades of title-inflation at the BBC, which has given ever more status to senior reporters, presumably because it is cheaper to do that than to offer higher pay.”

— Evan Davis

19. “Now undoubtedly, we face some very British challenges when it comes to infrastructure. We rightly cherish our back yards and green spaces, and we’ll defend them passionately when projects are announced. We live in a democracy, and we like to debate these things, often for many years.”

— Evan Davis

20. “What is so striking about Liberia is that in a place where there is so much to be done, I have never seen so many people with nothing to do.”

— Evan Davis

21. “I don’t want to sound like ‘chirpy Evan’ who’s just bouncing around with his unrealistic views and doesn’t understand what’s going on.”

— Evan Davis

22. “I swing both ways. I can see things from a kind of conservative point of view and from a more socially liberal or left-wing point of view.”

— Evan Davis

23. “For me, the main principle for broadcasters has to be that if people stand to benefit from an interview, they should be prepared to face some downside as well.”

— Evan Davis

24. “For industry to settle in a country, you first need electricity; for electricity, you need some trained workers; for trained workers, you need some schools; for schools you need some money; for money, you need some industry.”

— Evan Davis

25. “I don’t particularly like going on about being gay or making a big thing about it, but I think it’s a bit of a pain to be secretive about it.”

— Evan Davis

26. “Art can help a town by attracting a certain Bohemian population that adds life to the bars, character to the streets and a buzz to the name. Employers may then follow. But art can’t do much if every town does it. There aren’t enough Bohemians.”

— Evan Davis

27. “We are more likely to cheat if we see others doing so. We tend to conform to accepted norms of reasonable behaviour, rather than adhere to strict rules.”

— Evan Davis

28. “One of the key problems is that the Germans know what they do because everywhere they go there’s a ‘made in Germany’ label on it – they can feel proud of Volkswagens and Audis and Mercedes.”

— Evan Davis

29. “Personally, I’d like us to have a few more women on the ‘Today’ programme.”

— Evan Davis

30. “I’ve never enjoyed sleep as much until I got the ‘Today’ job. There is something about early sleep that’s much better than late sleep. I feel myself going to sleep; I don’t just plonk my head on the pillow. It’s a sort of winding-down thing.”

— Evan Davis

31. “It’s amazing, if you know what you want to say, how fast it is to write.”

— Evan Davis

32. “The Germans are clear about what they do – cars and machine tools; the Japanese are clear about what they do – electronics; the Chinese are clear about what they do – they’re the workshop of the world.”

— Evan Davis

33. “The key thing about me is that I’m really not very interesting.”

— Evan Davis

34. “Even the ‘Today’ programme involves a balance between the worthy-but-heavy items with the worthless-but-entertainingly-light ones.”

— Evan Davis

35. “Once we are fed, heated, housed and healthy, our extra consumption inevitably has an element of luxury about it. And once luxury enters the scene, the practicalities are in trouble, as women who wear expensive stiletto heels can testify.”

— Evan Davis

36. “My instinct is to assume that we consumers are an inconsistent bunch. We like competition if it delivers low prices, but grumble if it delivers the bad news that prices need to go up.”

— Evan Davis

37. “We all know that Americans love their statistics – in sport, obviously. And in finance too.”

— Evan Davis

38. “Being funny, it turns out, is like being a bank. It’s a confidence trick. As long as everyone believes in you, you are fine.”

— Evan Davis

39. “Mistakes are nothing to be ashamed of.”

— Evan Davis

40. “Historically, the British have always been rather wary of grand engineering projects – perhaps understandably, given that many of them have been delivered late and over budget.”

— Evan Davis

41. “What comes with a job as a staff member of the BBC is a certain self-censoring that you get utterly used to. You don’t say everything you think. You hold back on some things.”

— Evan Davis

42. “It doesn’t annoy me but I think of myself as a presenter who is gay, rather than a gay presenter. It’s a subtle distinction, but that’s how I view it.”

— Evan Davis

43. “At the BBC we’ve had plenty of women in good management jobs. It comes and goes but there’s been plenty. On air, I think there’s quite a bit more we can do.”

— Evan Davis

44. “I rarely come away from presenting the ‘Today’ programme without some sense of regret. There is always some question that I should have asked, or some point that I should have made. This is annoying but not surprising. Perfection is hard to achieve in a three-hour live programme.”

— Evan Davis

45. “Britain, however, has ended up specializing in the ones you don’t see as much of: defense aerospace, making drive shafts for cars, pills and drugs, designing chips that go into 94 percent of the world’s mobile phones.”

— Evan Davis

46. “The fact that radio is so hopeless at delivering data makes it an uncluttered medium, offering the basic story without the detailed trappings. But it does mean that if data is important, radio is probably not your place.”

— Evan Davis

47. “Reducing every issue to an argument can become stale but it’s often a very good way of clarifying issues.”

— Evan Davis

48. “Some people harbour an awkward clash of feelings – homosexual attraction on the one hand and shame or embarrassment about that attraction on the other. It is well known that the mind struggles to sustain conflicting views.”

— Evan Davis

49. “The cognitive point here is that we generally make sense of confusing things by judging them against various preconceptions. When confronted with a new proposition we don’t start thinking about it with a blank sheet in front of us; instead, we place the proposition somewhere in relation to our pre-existing structure of beliefs and attitudes, this makes liked much easier, because we can reduce even a complicated judgement to a simple binary one – does it conform to my existing views or not?”

— Evan Davis