Jeremy Clarkson Quotes

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

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.

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

You're a car, but most of all, what you are, what you've become, is a mate. And that's what makes a car special. That's what makes a car great. You start to think of it as a person. You start to love it.

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'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.

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

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

Being smarter than you look is better than looking smarter than you are.

I started to realise that being impolite saves an awful lot of time and costs you nothing.

Cows eat grass and silage. This is melting the ice caps and killing us all. So they need a new foodstuff: something that is rich in iron, calcium and natural goodness. Plainly they cannot eat meat so here is an idea to chew on. Why not feed them vegetarians?

Speed focuses the mind. It cuts through the fog of drab everyday living and keeps us on our toes. Speed works. Speed saves lives. Speed is good. And we should have more of it, not less.

This car is more fun than the entire French air force crashing into a firework factory.

We all know that small cars are good for us. But so is cod liver oil. And jogging.

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

The Suzuki Wagon R should be avoided like unprotected sex with an Ethiopian transvestite

[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.

The only person to ever look good in the back of a 4-seater convertible was Adolf Hitler

You have city centre pubs where men go to meet girls, not realising that all girls in city centre pubs have thighs like tug boats and morals that would surprise a zoo animal.

Americans are good at herding Bison. The end.

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!

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.

Let's be perfectly clear, shall we. The fox is not a little orange puppy dog with doe eyes and a waggly tail. It's a disease-ridden wolf with the morals of a psychopath and the teeth of a great white shark.

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.

I don't understand bus lanes. Why do poor people have to get to places quicker than I do?

I don't often agree with the RSPCA as I believe it is an animal's duty to be on my plate at supper time.

I mean its a weekly occurrence that somebody will complain that Top Gear was on last night - and you just sit back and wait for the complaints. But if you start to pay attention to everyones concerns, you end up with something bland and boring. So you sort of have to ignore everybody in order to do the show how we want to do it.

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.

I was reading The Mirror the other day and came across a letter from a reader who wrote, 'I was riding my bike to work when this red Ferrari pulled up next to me. Out of the window, Jeremy Clarkson shouted 'Get a car', and drove off.' What I actually said was, 'Get a car you hatchet faced, leaf-eating tw*t

If you were to buy a [BMW] 6-series, I recommend you select reverse when leaving friends’ houses so they don’t see its backside.

Sometimes I stagger even myself with my genius.

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.

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.

She can take a year to read something, whereas I like a book that becomes more important in my life that life itself. When I was in the middle of 'Red Storm Rising' by Tom Clancy - which was not selected for the Man Booker shortlist - you could have taken my liver out and fed it to the dog. And I wouldn't have noticed.

I think Koenigsegg is Swedish for: Oh no, my head has just exploded!

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.

I like to be loved by my children, and I quite like the Guardian hating me.

Ooh good I've got syphilis, the BEST of the sexually transmitted diseases.

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

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.

Whenever I’m suffering from insomnia, I just look at a picture of a Toyota Camry and I’m straight off.

Do not cruise through red lights. Because if I'm coming the other way, I will run you down, for fun.

The air conditioning in Lamborghinis used to be an asthmatic sitting in the dashboard blowing at you through a straw.

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

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.

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.

All this health and safety talk is just killing me.

Biathletes need to eat 6.000 calories a day: six thousand! That's the equivalent of 2 pounds of butter, 70 slices of bread, 112 eggs, 86 tabs of yogurts, 28 potatoes, 117 biscuits and 21 TWIX bars. On that basis, I could be an Olympic biathlete!

The Americans lecture the world on democracy and then won’t let me turn the traction control off!

...it seemed appropriate that I should develop some kind of illness. This is a good idea when you are at a loose end because everything, up to and including herpes, is better than being bored.