John Buchan
John Buchan
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, GCMG, GCVO, CH, PCwas a Scottish novelist, historian and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth26 August 1875
funny running humor
[W]ithout humour you cannot run a sweetie-shop, let alone a nation.
call given highest
What would you call the highest happiness? Wratislaw was ask. The sense of competence, was the answer, given without hesitation.
greatness leadership task
The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.
years shining flesh
The robe of flesh wears thin, and with the years God shines through all things.
believe secret wealth
You see only the productions of second-rate folk who are in a hurry to get wealth and fame. The true knowledge, the deadly knowledge, is still kept secret. But, believe me, my friend, it is there.
sea people mastery
You may hear people say that submarines have done away with the battleship, and that aircraft have annulled the mastery of the sea. That is what our pessimists say. But do you imagine that the clumsy submarine or the fragile aeroplane is really the last word of science?
law divine-justice together
Civilisation needs more than the law to hold it together. You see, all mankind are not equally willing to accept as divine justice what is called human law.
adventure men games
I once played the chief part in a rather exciting business without ever once budging from London . And the joke of it was that the man who went out to look for adventure only saw a bit of the game, and I who sat in my chambers saw it all and pulled the strings. 'They also serve who only stand and wait,' you know.
heart home thinking
It was foreordained that I should go alone to Umvelos', and in the promptings of my own infallible heart I believed I saw the workings of Omnipotence. Such is our moral arrogance, and yet without such a belief I think that mankind would have ever been content to bide sluggishly at home.
hands brain matter
Fortunately for mankind the brain in a life of action turns more to the matter in hand than to conjuring up the chances of the future.
fashion blood flesh
The vows we take in the holy place bind us till we are purged of them at Inanda's Kraal. Till then no blood must be shed and no flesh eaten. It was the fashion of our forefathers.
girl eye romance
Young girls passed me with romance still in their eyes, and others, a little older, with the romance dead.
heaven world earth
In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility.
organization quality merit
Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality.