"Nice guys finish last, but we get to sleep in."
Read quote
82 likes
Quote collection
Evan Davis quotes (page 1 of 4)
63 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
Read quote
55 likes
"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."
Read quote
52 likes
"It's not a bad idea to occasionally spend a little time thinking about things you take for granted. Plain everyday things."
Read quote
44 likes
"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."
Read quote
21 likes
"In principle, there are only three main components of spending that much matter to monetary policy: consumer spending, business investment and exports and trade."
Read quote
19 likes
"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."
Read quote
18 likes
"Phyllis is one of the tunnel boring machines for Crossrail and one of the most extraordinary characters I met, visiting some of the most exciting infrastructure in Britain. Crossrail is the new railway which will run from West to East right across London. It is the biggest engineering project in Europe - and Phyllis herself is not exactly dainty."
Read quote
15 likes
"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."
Read quote
13 likes
"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."
Read quote
13 likes
"Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car."
Read quote
11 likes
"A chair's function is not just to provide a place to sit; it is to provide a medium for self-expression. Chairs are about status, for example. Or signalling something about oneself. That's why the words chair, seat and bench have found themselves used to describe high status professions, from academia to Parliament to the law."
Read quote
10 likes
"If you're not making some mistakes, it probably means you're not trying hard enough."
Read quote
8 likes
"All socio-political phenomena in the U.K. come laden with the baggage of a class-based theory or two attached to them. In the case of gay Tories, there is one particularly silly variant of the category, which asserts that gayness is bred in public schools and thus fits with Conservatism like hand in glove."
Read quote
6 likes
"Men don't know much about women. We do know when they're happy. We know when they're crying, and we know when they're pissed off. We just don't know in what order these are gonna come at us."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"Most people hugely underestimate the amount of 'empty space' we have in our country. Fly over the U.K., and you see that human settlement does not fill up the U.K. at all. It accounts for something of the order of 15 per cent of the landmass."
Read quote
6 likes
"Mistakes are nothing to be ashamed of."
Read quote
4 likes
"It's amazing, if you know what you want to say, how fast it is to write."
Read quote
4 likes