21 Quotes by Michael Booth

They go out, they drink a lot of beer and they eat dead pigs, and then they go home and have sex with strangers afterwards.

This ungodly act is simply something that Finns do, like the British and their DIY, or the French and their adultery.

The country now has the second highest GDP per capita in the world after Luxembourg, and Luxembourg is hardly a proper country.

Living as a richer person among the poor is very stressful

Norwegian racism is always a kind of racism that is not prepared to accept it being qualified as such. Because we're the good guys, and racism is what bad people do.

In Sweden, self-sufficiency and autonomy is all; [interpersonal] debt of any kind, be it emotional, a favor, or cash, is to be avoided at all cost. The Swedes don't even like to owe a round of drinks.

Everything I read about the Swedish Social Democratic government of the last century suggested an organization that was driven by one single, overarching goal: to sever the traditional, some would say natural, ties between its citizens, be they those that bound children to their parents, workers to their employers, wives to their husbands, or the elderly to their families.

Swedes don't like to ask favors of each other: they keep their problems to themselves and suffer in silence. Being duktig is one facet of this: if you are duktig then you don't need any help, and as duktighet is the ultimate ideal for Swedes; to ask for help - or even to give it - is a kind of low-level social taboo.

EARLY ONE DARK April morning a few years ago I was sitting in my living room in central Copenhagen, wrapped in a blanket and yearning for spring, when I opened that day’s newspaper to discover that my adopted countrymen had been anointed the happiest of their species in something called the Satisfaction with Life Index, compiled by the Department of Psychology at the University of Leicester.I checked the date on the newspaper: it wasn’t 1 April.