Top 35 Simon Hoggart Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Canada is not so much a country as a clothesline nearly 4,000 miles long. St John’s in Newfoundland is closer to Milan, Italy than to Vancouver.”

— Simon Hoggart

2. “Living in New York is like being at some terrible late-night party. You’re tired, you’ve had a headache since you arrived, but you can’t leave because then you’d miss the party.”

— Simon Hoggart

3. “I think the great thing about grandparents is seeing another home, realising that people you love can have different priorities, different diversions, different opinions and lead quite different lives from the ones you see every day, and that is immensely valuable.”

— Simon Hoggart

4. “Seeing John Major govern the country is like watching Edward Scissorhands try to make balloon animals.”

— Simon Hoggart

5. “Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?”

— Simon Hoggart

6. “America loves the representation of its heroes to be not just larger than life, but stupendously, awesomely bigger than anything else. If blue whales built statues to each other they’d be smaller then these.”

— Simon Hoggart

7. “I know of no wars started by anyone to impose lack of religion on someone else. We have lethal Sunni v Shia, Catholic against Protestant, but no agnostic suicide bombers attack crowded atheist pubs.”

— Simon Hoggart

8. “They’re called Virgin Trains because they don’t go all the way.”

— Simon Hoggart

9. “Peter Mandelson is the only man I know who can skulk in broad daylight.”

— Simon Hoggart

10. “I’ve been intrigued by ‘Le Monde’ ever since work took me to Paris once, and I noted that on a day when there was some huge worldwide story, the paper led its front page on some cabinet changes in Turkey. It implied a magnificent disdain for the quotidian folderol of mere news.”

— Simon Hoggart

11. “Americans are fascinated by their own love of shopping. This does not make them unique. It’s just that they have more to buy than most other people on the planet. And it’s also an affirmation of faith in their country.”

— Simon Hoggart

12. “I’m often amazed at the way politicians, who spend hours poring over opinion poll results in a desperate attempt to discover what the public thinks, are certain they know precisely what God’s views are on everything.”

— Simon Hoggart

13. “Some government expenditure actually makes a profit. Our theatre leads the world. Loads of tourists must be attracted by the fact that you could spend a week in London doing nothing but visit superb museums and galleries, free.”

— Simon Hoggart

14. “Disney World has acquired by now something of the air of a national shrine. American parents who don’t take their children there sense obscurely that they have failed in some fundamental way, like Muslims who never made it to Mecca.”

— Simon Hoggart

15. “Poor Harper Seven Beckham, having to live with that name all her life. It’s the Boy Named Sue syndrome; at the very least it will toughen her up.”

— Simon Hoggart

16. “A British lawyer would like to think of himself as part of that mysterious entity called The Law; an American lawyer would like a swimming pool and two houses.”

— Simon Hoggart

17. “If you read the ‘Daily Mail,’ you would imagine that the British middle classes lead lives of unremitting misery.”

— Simon Hoggart

18. “In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you’re told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.”

— Simon Hoggart

19. “Remember how Margaret Thatcher came to believe that abroad was more important than at home? Didn’t do her much good.”

— Simon Hoggart

20. “I know of no wars started by anyone to impose lack of religion on someone else.”

— Simon Hoggart

21. “Watching the Commons tribute to Margaret Thatcher was like being suffocated inside a gigantic sticky toffee pudding, but one with nasty bogeys planted inside. There was much of the ‘Margaret Thatcher who was lucky enough to know me,’ especially from her own side of the House.”

— Simon Hoggart

22. “The formal Washington dinner party has all the spontaneity of a Japanese imperial funeral.”

— Simon Hoggart

23. “Until now their line has been that the Tories are incapable of doing anything about poverty, and aren’t interested in doing it in the first place. By contrast, Labour says, we are also incapable of doing anything about poverty, but would dearly love to do something. If we knew what.”

— Simon Hoggart

24. “The Chinese do make vast quantities of wine for home consumption, but you wouldn’t want to drink it yourself.”

— Simon Hoggart

25. “When you visit a foreign city you are in it, but not of it, separated by a glass wall. Once, while a student, I was getting dressed in my ground-floor room when a family of Italians crossed the grass to watch, as if I were laid on for their amusement and instruction.”

— Simon Hoggart

26. “Reagan was a flesh and blood version of any other mute national emblem, say the Statue of Liberty. Everyone knows what she represents, but no one would dream of asking her opinion.”

— Simon Hoggart

27. “Reagan is the only man to take the presidency as a part-time job, a means of filling up the otherwise empty hours of retirement.”

— Simon Hoggart

28. “There are few tribes more loathsome than the American Right, and their vicious use of the shortcomings in the NHS to attack Barack Obama’s attempts at health reform are a useful reminder.”

— Simon Hoggart

29. “Most successful American politicians look well-fed on endorsements, campaign contributions and chicken dinners.”

— Simon Hoggart

30. “In Washington, success is just a training course for failure.”

— Simon Hoggart

31. “I’ve served on five different juries, and many of them were bonkers in their own way.”

— Simon Hoggart

32. “Switzerland still has a huge share of the watch market, all advertised at the airport on illuminated hoardings. Gosh, they are ugly.”

— Simon Hoggart

33. “While it is entirely untrue that Canadians lack a sense of humour, the funniest ones tend to head south: Dan Aykroyd, Jim Carrey, Michael J. Fox.”

— Simon Hoggart

34. “The nanny seemed to be extinct until 1975, when, like the coelacanth, she suddenly and unexpectedly reappeared in the shape of Margaret Thatcher.”

— Simon Hoggart

35. “Even I would find a book about my life pretty dull.”

— Simon Hoggart