111 Quotes by Evan Davis

I rarely come away from presenting the ‘Today’ programme without some sense of regret. There is always some question that I should have asked, or some point that I should have made. This is annoying but not surprising. Perfection is hard to achieve in a three-hour live programme.

Even the ‘Today’ programme involves a balance between the worthy-but-heavy items with the worthless-but-entertainingly-light ones.

Now undoubtedly, we face some very British challenges when it comes to infrastructure. We rightly cherish our back yards and green spaces, and we’ll defend them passionately when projects are announced. We live in a democracy, and we like to debate these things, often for many years.

We all know that Americans love their statistics – in sport, obviously. And in finance too.

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.

One of the key problems is that the Germans know what they do because everywhere they go there’s a ‘made in Germany’ label on it – they can feel proud of Volkswagens and Audis and Mercedes.

Personally, I’d like us to have a few more women on the ‘Today’ programme.

Being funny, it turns out, is like being a bank. It’s a confidence trick. As long as everyone believes in you, you are fine.

Reducing every issue to an argument can become stale but it’s often a very good way of clarifying issues.