Boris Johnson

When lorry drivers come up behind me and I'm cycling, innocently keeping to my side of the road, and they decide because they are so big, and their lorry is so powerful, and they just want to clear me out of the road, and they hoot aggressively, then I do see red a bit. I do. ”

The truth is that the history of the last couple of thousand years has been broadly repeated attempts by various people or institutions - in a Freudian way - to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe, this golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, by trying to unify it. ”

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'm not one of those people who believes in going endlessly around finger wagging and ticking people off for occasional colourful use of language. ”

The beauty and riddle in studying the motives of any politician is in trying to decide what is idealism and what is self-interest, and often we are left to conclude that the answer is a mixture of the two. ”

I do think human beings cannot be faulted for wishing to judge themselves and their lives and their achievements by others around them; that is a natural human feeling. ”

What I really think about Banksy is I think he's a genius; he's a great artist, and I like his stuff. But he's got to accept it if, from time to time, someone will need to paint over his work. ”

I believe in immigration. But I feel people think it would be better if there was an Australian-style points based system so we could actually get a good system. ”

There's an idea that London is a planet on its own: that it's starting to diverge from the rest of the solar system. We need to combat that. ”

I'm in politics to change things - if possible, for the better. I was a journalist for a long time, but I had a kind of midlife crisis, and I decided I needed to do something to get on the pitch and stop endlessly kicking over other peoples' sandcastles. ”