Jeremy Clarkson Quotes

[on the BMW X3] If you are clinically insane, by which I mean you wake up in the morning and think you are an onion, here's your car.

Now we get quite a lot of complaints that we don't feature enough affordable cars on the show so we'll kick off tonight with the cheapest Ferrari of them all!

Governments would rather spend their money on another bomber than education, and why do we fear black men when every bit of suffering in our lives has a Caucasian face attached to it?

They are by far the worst drivers. They are spiteful, dithering, old and in the way. They should have their licences taken away.

Racing cars which have been converted for road use never really work. It's like making a hard core adult film, and then editing it so that it can be shown in British hotels. You'd just end up with a sort of half hour close up of some bloke's sweaty face.

A turbo: exhaust gasses go into the turbocharger and spin it, witchcraft happens and you go faster.

Boredom forces you to ring people you haven’t seen for eighteen years and halfway through the conversation you remember why you left it so long. Boredom means you start to read not only mail-order catalogues but also the advertising inserts that fall on the floor. Boredom gives you half a mind to get a gun and go berserk in the local shopping centre, and you know where this is going. Eventually, boredom means you will take up golf.

This is the Renault Espace, probably the best of the people carriers. Not that that's much to shout about. That's like saying “Ooh good I've got syphilis, the BEST of the sexually transmitted diseases.”

I love Alfa Romeos and that [Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio] was tremendous.

Does anyone really imagine for a moment that my wife gives two stuffs about global warming? She certainly did not appear to be all that bothered on Thursday evening when, during the great carbon-saving switch-off, I ran round the house furiously turning on every light, hair dryer, dishwasher and toaster.

Supercars are supposed to run over Arthur Scargill and then run over him again for good measure. They are designed to melt ice caps, kill the poor, poison the water table, destroy the ozone layer, decimate indigenous wildlife, recapture the Falkland Islands and turn the entire third world into a huge uninhabitable desert, all that before they nicked all the oil in the world.

Some say that he has no understanding of clouds, and that his ear wax tastes like Turkish Delight. All we know is he’s called the Stig.

Ecologically speaking, a spilt tanker load is like sticking a safety pin into an elephant's foot. The planet barely notices. After the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska the oil company spent billions tidying up the coastline, but it was a waste of money because the waves were cleaning up faster than Exxon could. Environmentalists can never accept the planet's ability to self-heal.

That [Pagani] Zonda, really! It’s like a lion in orange dungarees. Kind of fierce, but ridiculous all at the same time.

Looking good in Italy is even more important than looking where you're going.

Like every big organisation these days, the BBC is obsessed with the wellbeing of those who set foot on its premises. Studios must display warning notices if there is real glass on the set, and the other day I was presented with a booklet explaining how to use a door. I am not kidding.

Then there’s the biggest problem of them all – the problem of being in an Audi TT when you are not called Angela. I do not know why it can be driven by only people named Angela, but that’s a fact and there’s nothing we can do about it. If you have a TT and you aren’t called Angela, you have the wrong car.

Some say he never blinks, and that he roams around the woods at night foraging for wolves. All we know is he’s called the Stig.

I'm sorry, but having an Aston Martin DB9 on the drive and not driving it is a bit like having Keira Knightley in your bed and sleeping on the couch.

Owning a TVR in the past was like owning a bear. I mean it was great, until it pulled your head off, which it would.

Change gear, change gear, check mirror, murder a prostitute, change gear, change gear, murder. That's a lot of effort in a day.

I rang up Jay Kay, who's got one, and said: 'Can we borrow yours?' and he said, 'Yeah, if I can borrow your daughter, because it amounts to the same thing.'

There are many rules for the elderly in the Highway Code. I have one too, and here it is: get a bloody move on.

Speed has never killed anyone. Suddenly becoming stationary, that's what gets you.

In the olden days I always got the impression that TVR built a car, put it on sale, and then found out how it handled. Usually when one of their customers wrote to the factory complaining about how dead he was.

Extravagant is, I think, the word we all thought when we met ... A lot of money went into that [The Grand Tour's ]. I just thought it would be a good idea to have a bridge from the old to the new and that was a way of saying 'Right, well now look where we are.'

If we build three million new houses by 2020, where will we grow all the stuff needed to feed the people who live in them?

We live in the worst country in the world. At least we do for lazy, inefficient, office-bound police, whose response to an extraordinary rise in violent crime is to order more speed cameras.

I'm not only in touch with my feminine side, I'm in touch with my gay side as well.

It’s what non-car people don’t get. They see all cars as just a ton and a half, two tons of wires, glass, metal, and rubber, and that’s all they see. People like you or I know we have an unshakable belief that cars are living entities… You can develop a relationship with a car and that’s what non-car people don’t get… When something has foibles and won’t handle properly, that gives it a particularly human quality because it makes mistakes, and that’s how you can build a relationship with a car that other people won’t get.

Telling people at a dinner party you drive a Nissan Almera is like telling them you've got the Ebola virus and you're about to sneeze.

The "public" seems to have bought into this belief that life can, and should, be run without risk, that all accidents are avoidable, and that death is something that only happens to people who eat meat and smoke.

No, no, no. There's no such thing as cheap and cheerful. It's cheap and nasty & expensive and cheerful.

Asking the front wheels of a car to do their normal job of steering while handling more than 170 is like asking a man to wire a plug while juggling. Penguins. While making love. To a beautiful woman while on fire, on stage. In front of the Queen. It's all going to go wrong.

Sometimes I stagger even myself with my genius.

The fact is that Britain is the most warlike nation on earth. In the history of armed combat, we are the only democracy to have declared war on another democracy - England versus Finland in the second world war, in case you're interested - and we're always at the front of the queue when Johnny Foreigner gets a bit uppity. Who stood up to the Kaiser? Who stood up to Adolf? And let's not forget the Argies. What other country would have sent its fleet halfway round the world and lost 250 men to protect a flock of sheep and some oil that might or might not be there? We're still at it.

There are shantytowns in South Africa that are built better than Renaults!

All this health and safety talk is just killing me.

I'm a horse of a man!

Some say his droppings have been found as far north as York, and that he has a full size tattoo of his face, on his face. All we know is he’s called the Stig.

God may have created the world in six days, but while he was resting on the seventh, Beelzebub popped up and did this place.

Mix an anorexic body with a heart made of pure fire and you are going to go with a savagery that's hard to explain.

My epiglottis is full of bees!

Usually, a Range Rover would be beaten away from the lights by a diesel powered wheelbarrow.

Americans are good at herding Bison. The end.

It was as relaxing as being tickled.

If I like somebody else's tribe I'm going to promote the hell out of it. The whole thing is a democracy, and if somebody's more popular then good luck to them.

Multi-tasking is the ability to screw everything up simultaneously.