Alan Coren Quotes

Perhaps our Irish friends should not so completely turn their backs on their historical dishes, no matter how many jokes they might have to endure.

Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing.

It seems hopeless, hopeless. Those who eat meat [at public expense] are a mean, selfish lot, and so the country is doomed. Our only hope lies in the grass-roots folk who eat our traditional food.

I live full-time in the world of omnivores, and I've never wanted to leave. But the Standard American Diet (yes, it's SAD) got to me as it gets to almost everyone in this country.

This country to-day [is] the last stronghold of freedom, standing like a rock in a tide that is threatened to submerge the world.

Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.

How can people say they don't eat eggplant when God loves the color and the French love the name? I don't under'stand.

Americans hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.

The magic word for me is pumpernickel. I love pumpernickel. I must have some Russian blood in me because I could just eat pumpernickel and raw onions.

I feel like we [americans] are a unique nation in this world, in that we are able to implement great change in our society over a relatively short period of time. What takes centuries in Europe, we accomplish in a generation.

The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one - America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.

The lesson about food is that the most predictable and the most orderly outcomes are always not the best. They are just easier to describe. Fads are orderly. Food carts and fires aren't. Feeding the world could be a delicious mess, full of diverse flavors and sometimes good old-fashioned smoke.

There is a considerable polarization taking place here, increasing the gap between rich and poor. It's most dramatic in Third World countries, of course, but in the rich countries it's also very noticeable.

I think one big reason why Sweden might have a good reputation around the world is that if you look at Norway or Denmark or Finland, any of the Scandinavian countries, they all seem less interested in being a part of the larger world, where Sweden has always tried to reach out, whether it's with Volvos, Saabs, H&Ms, music, clothes.

There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.

No country in the world can yet say they have achieved gender equality.

I believed Afghanistan was always going to be hard. It's the fifth poorest country in the world. And when you fly over it, you realize that there's not much there. And, of course, it has the problem, too, of being on that border with Pakistan in basically an ungoverned region that has given the terrorists a staging ground. So it's a very difficult place. But I do believe that the mission there can succeed if success is defined as helping the Afghans to prevent the Taliban from being an existential threat to the Afghan government.

The United States is absolutely the most dangerous country in the world.

We can talk about the economy, we can talk about Social Security. The biggest problem this world has is nuclear proliferation. And we have a country out there, North Korea, which is sort of wacko, which is not a bunch of dummies. And they are going out and they are developing nuclear weapons. And they're not doing it because they're having fun doing it. They're doing it for a reason. And wouldn't it be good to sit down and really negotiate something and ideally negotiate? Now, if that negotiation doesn't work, you'd better solve the problem now than solve it later.

During the 1960s, and again in the 1970s, growth in manufacturing productivity in the United Kingdom was the lowest of all the seven major industrial countries in the world. During the 1980s, our annual rate of growth of output per head in manufacturing has been the highest of all the seven major industrial countries.

The US is not a superpower. The US is a financially dependent country that foreign lenders can close down at will. Washington still hasn’t learned this. American hubris can lead the administration and Congress into a bailout solution that the rest of the world, which has to finance it, might not accept.

The United States of American business pays the second-highest business taxes in the world, 35 percent. Ireland pays 11 percent. Now, if you're a business person, and you can locate any place in the world, then, obviously, if you go to the country where it's 11 percent tax versus 35 percent, you're going to be able to create jobs, increase your business, make more investment, et cetera. I want to cut that business tax. I want to cut it so that businesses will remain in the United States of America and create jobs.

England is the only civilised country in the world where it is etiquette to fall on the food like a wolf the moment it is served. Elsewhere it is comme il faut to wait until everybody has helped himself to everything and until everything on everybody's plate is stone cold.

We have to stop. We have allowed so many people into our country that should not be here. We have our San Bernardinos, we have had the World Trade Centre come down because of people that should not have been in our country, and now we are supposed to take 2,000. It sends such a bad signal. You have no idea. It is such a bad thing.

While I am a lawyer by profession and have travelled to several countries, working and educating myself, I came from a rural background in a Third World country at a time when women were told what their place was and whose mothers enjoyed even less.