Boris Johnson Quotations

London is a fantastic creator of jobs - but many of these jobs are going to people who don't originate in this country.

So I'm definitely in favour of stimulating the dynamic wealth creation sectors of the economy.

My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.

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

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

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.

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.

Ping-pong was invented on the dining tables of England in the 19th century, and it was called Wiff-waff! And there, I think, you have the difference between us and the rest of the world. Other nations, the French, looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner; we looked at it an saw an opportunity to play Wiff-waff.

I am supporting David Cameron purely out of cynical self-interest.

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

It is easy to make promises - it is hard work to keep them.

What I worry about is that people are losing confidence, losing energy, losing enthusiasm, and there's a real opportunity to get them into work.

It just happens I write fast and always have done.

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.

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

The Lib Dems are not just empty. They are a void within a vacuum surrounded by a vast inanition.

We are experiencing such large support for the Olympic relay that our advice is to stay in your neighbourhood, stay in your borough and wait for it to come near you.

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

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

I think the risks that people see of terrorism are incredibly important but we are very confident we have got the right people on it and the risks have been minimised.

I'd like thousands of schools as good as the one I went to, Eton.

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.

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

That is the best case for Bush; that, among other things, he liberated Iraq. It is good enough for me.

I want London to be a competitive, dynamic place to come to work.

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

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

The job of mayor of London is unbelievably taxing, particularly in the run-up to the Olympics.

I am hoping very much to get re-elected but it is going to be a tough fight.

I promised to run the most open and transparent administration in Britain. That is why, with this brutally honest and unprecedented progress report, I am determined to level with Londoners.

I want to win and I want to be in office.

The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP they have run out of better ideas.

Times have been tough, the economy has been tough. But I want to bring forward a fantastic manifesto for taking the city forwards.

It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time.

I want to offer particular congratulations to Andrea Leadsom on her stunning achievement. She is now well placed to win and replace the absurd gloom in some quarters with a positive, confident and optimistic approach, not just to Europe, but to government all round.

You are part of our Great British family.

Our friends in America will be at the front of the queue for trade deals.

I'm no communist.I'm a tax cutting Conservative. But I want a capitalism that is fairer to forgotten people.

This is our chance to build a Britain where everyone benefits from the success of the economy.

Humanity would have plunged into a new dark age of absolutely frightening and appalling characteristics without Churchill.

I think it's absolutely amazing and how the Remain side have the cheek to come and tell us that we improve our security by staying in this organisation I do not understand.

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

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.

[People] are woefully underestimating this country and what it can achieve.

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

I cant remember what my line on drugs is. Whats my line on drugs?

The Geiger-counter of Olympomania is going to go zoink off the scale,

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The mayors fund for London will be a streamlined vehicle for getting money from the wealth creating sector to communities across London that are facing hardship and deprivation and are the victims of crime.

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.

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

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.

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.

I would ban sweets from school - but this pressure to bring in healthy food is too much

Can I say anything good about Ken Livinstone? A long time ago he did some good things, but I can't now remember what any of them were.

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

Life isn't like coursework, baby. It's one damn essay crisis after another.

Since January 1993 there have been 27 other countries not in the EU that have done better than the UK at exporting goods into the single market.

I'm a one-nation Tory.

I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally gone mad ... he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help.

As a Scot Gordon Brown will find it hard to convince people in England he should be prime minister

We need to remember that we can't compete endlessly with other nations that set their income taxes substantially lower than ours. They will attract jobs, and investment. They may generate more tax - and they may even persuade their tennis champs to run that extra half yard

I think it is going to be wonderful. I went to the Paralympics in Beijing and have seen how brilliant the sport is at first hand. People are going to love it. It is going to change people's attitudes to Paralympians and it is going to be a great show.

My point is that this Potter business has legs. It will run and run, and we must be utterly mad, as a country, to leave it to the Americans to make money from a great British invention. I appeal to the children of this country and to their Potter-fiend parents to write to Warner Bros and Universal, and perhaps, even, to the great J K herself. Bring Harry home to Britain-and if you want a site with less rainfall than Rome, with excellent public transport, and strong connections to Harry Potter, I have just the place.

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

It was the kind of blind, gulping, insensate greed that you associate with some milk-eyed creature in a volcanic fissure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench-an organism with no understanding of the existence, let alone the feelings, of other members of the ecosystem.

All the people I talk to, increasingly, can see that the emperor has got no clothes. The case for leaving [the EU] is now overwhelming.

The next Tory leader would have to unify his party and ensure that Britain stood tall in the world.

This is not a time to quail, it is not a crisis, nor should we see it as an excuse for self-doubt. It is a moment of hope.

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.

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.

We celebrate the contribution of people who have come to this country to make it better.

The meat in the sausage has got to be Conservative.

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

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.

We did everything we could to break down barriers that restrain poorest.

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?

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.

Andrea Leadsom, I think, has all the qualities that you need at the moment. She's got a lot of zap, a lot of drive, and all the experience. Plus I think she can articulate what's needed at the moment, which is a bit of an antidote to some of the gloom and negativity and misunderstanding about what the Brexit vote means.

I want you to know that I have nothing against Orlando, though you are, of course, far more likely to get shot or robbed there than in London.

Remind me: who was the greater mass murderer, Stalin or Hitler? Well, Stalin is thought to have been responsible for about 50 million deaths, and Hitler for a mere 25 million. What Hitler did in his concentration camps was equalled if not exceeded in foulness by the Soviet gulags, forced starvation and pogroms. What makes the achievements of communist Russia so special and different, that you can simper around in a CCCP T-shirt, while anyone demented enough to wear anything commemorating the Third Reich would be speedily banged away under the 1986 Public Order Act?

Some people think that it [Brexit] is the end of the world. It's not. On the contrary, it's a massive opportunity for this country.

We need to look at our nannying, mollycoddled, politically correct culture in my view, which stops kids from going out and playing competitive sport. I also think we need to look at the shear fatness of the regulations which control people who want to help kids play sport.

I dont see why people are so snooty about Channel Five. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap-dancing, and other related and vital subjects

When my father began his work in the 1970s it was a very different EU. I pay tribute to what he did. But it has now become a very different proposition: the United States of Europe.

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

You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth—and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere.

My ideal world is, we're there, we're in the EU, trying to make it better.

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

It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness. They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in Watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.

If gay marriage was OK ... then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men; or indeed three men and a dog.

Ken doesn't think he's got anything to say sorry for and if that's really his feeling, then I think that he should stick to his guns.

Tremendous, little short of superb. On cracking form.

To rely on a train in Blair's Britain is to engage in a crapshoot with the devil.

The Tory Party - the funkiest, most jiving Party on Earth!

I've always known my life would be turned into a farce. I'm just glad it's been entrusted to two such distinguished men of letters.