James Cameron (journalist)

For other people known by the same name, see James Cameron.

Mark James Cameron (17 June 1911 – 26 January 1985) was a British journalist, broadcaster, travel-writer and historian, whose work bears the impress of his socialist and pacifist convictions.

Quotes

• The fabulous Eva, Government Glad-Hand Girl No. 1 of the extravagant political novelette that is Argentina.
  • Daily Express (17 March 1949).

• That worst evil of long dictatorships: the loss of all political experience.
  • News Chronicle (3 March 1954).

• When Nikita Khrushchev wrapped himself in the bloody mantle of the Czars he broke Hungary, he broke the little Communist parties over the western world, and he broke the hearts of many honest men who had trusted a little too far, a little too long.
  • News Chronicle (14 November 1956).

• I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living.
  • News Chronicle (22 February 1957).

• It was clumsy and cruel and thoughtless and without consideration. Step by step, the west blundered and floundered into a dilemma they never completely comprehended and never in fact sought: from the very beginning, they argued in cliches.
  • Describing the US actions against against North Vietnam (1965).

• Much of my life seems in retrospect to have been spent in the company of putative national leaders passing through the process of being denounced and imprisoned for sedition, as part of the inevitable progression towards the Prime Ministership and the ritual tea-party at Windsor Castle.
  • Point of Departure (London: Arthur Barker, 1967) p. 295.

• NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Where else but in Texas would men set up to administer space?
  • Cameron Country (BBC TV, 12 July 1969).

• The new world will be a place of answers and no questions, because the only questions left will be answered by computers, because only computers will know what to ask.
  • Cameron Country (BBC TV, 12 July 1969).

• I do not know why journalists insist on calling their stuff "pieces", when they are in fact little entities, attempting to have beginnings, middles and endings.
  • The Best of Cameron (Sevenoaks: New English Library, 1981) p. 49. ISBN 0450048810.

Attributed

• Muslims shared many of the deep-seated characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon elite—an intuitive resentment of culture, an amicable contempt for women, a proclivity for riding about on horses, a pleasure in discipline, and a covert homophilia.
  • from … "a book about India", quoted in an article by Roger Sandall[1]

• It was long ago in my life as a simple reporter that I decided that facts must never get in the way of truth.
  • The Encarta Book of Quotations (2000), p. 173