Quotes About Britain

Еhere's no doubt at all that the Norman conquest led to the hugely concentrated land ownership patterns that we still see in Britain today. Some of Britain's biggest landowners are still direct descendants of Norman barons. And given the impact that Britain has had on the world over the past few hundred years, you could perhaps say this was a global issue. History is always with us.

Britain is leaving and has de facto left the European Union; however, it has not withdrawn from its special relationship with the United States and I believe that the UK's relations with Russia depend on Britain's special relationship with the United States rather than on its presence in or absence from the European Union.

Great Britain is not part of the euro-zone; but the decision we take will have great importance for Great Britain.

Through its imperialist system Britain brought about untold suffering of millions of people. And this is an historical fact. To be able to admit this would increase the respect, you know, which we have for British institutions.

Every generation has its war. I have just been reminded of mine. It ended in 1989, 43 years after it began, the longest war Britain fought and certainly the most expensive. Its climax was total victory. Yet there was no parade, no medals, no colours hung in cathedrals. The Cold War saw no battles and cost almost no blood. Where there is no blood there is no glory and hence no history. Asked What did you do in the war, Daddy?, I could say only that I paid my taxes and left it at that.

I pay tribute to John Major's achievement in persuading the other 11 Community Heads of Government that they could move ahead to a Social Chapter but not within the treaty and without Britain's participation. It sets a vital precedent. For an enlarged Community can only function if we build in flexibility of that kind... John Major deserves high praise for ensuring at Maastricht that we would not have either a Single Currency or the absurd provisions of the Social Chapter forced upon us: our industry, workforce, and national prosperity will benefit as a result.

This is a proud day and an important step forward in the fight for equality in Britain. The overwhelming majority of Labour MPs supported this change to make sure marriage reflects the value we place on long-term, loving relationships whoever you love.

When I think of Britain, I don't think of these lofty ideals which once held sway like the stoic upper lip. I think of girls on a Saturday night outside kebab shops stabbing each other with stiletto heels or guys smashing glasses into someone's face. I think of shows like Big Brother which celebrate people's discomfort and anguish or kids committing these terrifying happy slapping acts of brutality to each other at the drop of a hat.

It is a terrible commentary on Christian civilization that the longest period of slave-raiding known to history was initiated by the action of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and Britain, after the Christian faith had for more than a thousand years been the established religion of Europe.

This is our chance to build a Britain where everyone benefits from the success of the economy.

I have done everything I can to move Britain out of the financial danger zone.

I get nostalgic for British negativity. There is an inherent hope and positive drive to New Yorkers. When you go back to Britain, everybody is just running everything down. It's like whatever the opposite of a hug is.

If he was an inch taller he'd be the best center half in Britain. His father is 6 ft 2 in - I'd check the milkman.

Britain's most useful role is somewhere between bee and dinosaur.

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.

In Britain, everything is policed except crime.

What I like about Britain is that I can live a normal life here.

As ever with modern Britain, we are let down by a vast, over-manned, over-funded, hidebound, obstructive, box-ticking and incompetent bureaucracy.

Courtesy is not dead - it has merely taken refuge in Great Britain.

It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the [congestion] charge that everybody else is paying and not actually try and skive out of it like some chiselling little crook.

I went back in British history. Some 204 people died there after a mine collapsed in 1838. In 1866, 361 miners died in Britain. In an explosion in 1894, 290 people died there.

Britain, with the most completely socialized health system in the West, now spends the lowest fraction of GNP on health care of any major nation. There are frequent complaints of excessive waits for elective surgery and other inconveniences, but British citizens live slightly longer than Americans, on average, and our overall health conditions are comparable.

Great Britain provided time; the United States provided money and Soviet Russia provided blood.

I did quite a lot of fencing when I was a kid, I was a swimmer, and I played a lot of basketball. I was a fencer for Great Britain, but I only did that because I watched Robin Hood, Star Wars, Highlander and The Three Musketeers, and I wanted to emulate Richard Harris and the great British actors that I grew up watching.

The British happened to the rest of the world. Now the world happens to Britain.

I couldn't walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at. It was a nightmare. My children were devastated because their dad was a figure of ridicule.

I think people look at me and realize that I am definitely not in line to the throne. It feels very easy living in Great Britain. The world is a much smaller place than it used to be, it doesn't feel like a huge cultural difference living here.

Most Britons still lived and died without encountering anyone whose skin colour was different from their own. Slaves, in short, did not threaten, at least as far as the British at home were concerned. Bestowing freedom upon them seemed therefore purely an act of humanity and will, an achievement that would be to Great Britain's economic detriment, perhaps, but would have few other domestic consequences.

The success of the abolitionist movement lay in its making real for people in Britain and America the slave ship's pervasive and utterly instrumental terror, which was indeed its defining feature.

The Irish move to a very low corporation tax has generated very significant revenue growth, considerably in excess of Britain's, where a slower economy has been combined with a number of stealth taxes.

Television of course actually started in Britain in 1936, and it was a monopoly, and there was only one broadcaster and it operated on a license which is not the same as a government grant.

I have no time for those who say there is no way Scotland could go it alone. I know first-hand the contribution Scotland and Scots make to Britain's success - so for me there's no question about whether Scotland could be an independent nation.

Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me - but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn't.

I'm carrying on. I'm making the case for unity, I'm making the case of what Labour can offer to Britain, of decent housing for people, of good secure jobs for people, of trade with Europe and of course with other parts of the world. Because if we don't get the trade issue right we've got a real problem in this country.

Books are special, books are the way we talk to generations that have not turned up yet. The fact that we can actually, essentially communicate with the people in ancient Egypt, people in Rome and Greece, people in ancient Britain, people in New York in the 1920s who can communicate to us and change the way we think, and change the things that we believe. I think that books are special. Books are sacred. And I think that when you are selling books, you have to remember that in all the profits and loss, in all of that, you are treading on sacred ground.

If you were born in Britain after World War II, you see a continuous atmosphere of decline, moral and economic and political.

My roots are still in Britain, that's where I live, that's the place where I come from.

The way we live in the West we live like kings. People moan about this and that in Britain but we have running water, electricity, security and a rule of law and so many people in the world don't have these.

The ban doesn't have anything to do with Livestrong or my ability to work in [the cancer] community. Perhaps it speeds it up. I don't know the examples in Great Britain of athletes who have fallen. I know the examples in the United States - the Tiger Woods, the Michael Vicks, even the Bill Clintons - people who are still out there able to work.

But I do think that Brexit, an exit of Britain from the European Union, would trigger real pressure on the United Kingdom.

In Great Britain the price of food is at a higher level than in any other country, and consequently, the British artisan labours at a disadvantage in proportion to the higher rate of his food.

On the one hand, there is no question that English - frequently bad English - has become the universal language of scholarship. It is clearly a tremendous handicap for people outside of the United States, Britain, and Australia and a few other countries because few of them are native speakers, but we demand that they present and publish in English.

I've always held the view that great states need strategic space. I mean, George Washington took his space from George III. Britain took it from just about everybody. Russia took all of Eastern Europe. Germany's taken it from everywhere they can, and China will want its space too.

I don't have to negotiate an arms agreement with Great Britain or with France.

The United States of America will sound as pompously in the world or in history as The Kingdom of Great Britain.

If you watch cooking shows on cable, they have lots of British people. Because when you think good cooking, you immediately think Britain.

At the moment, in Britain we're facing such enormous cutbacks in education programs and music programs and art programs that you feel you are knocking your head against a brick wall.

The Government have consistently made it clear that the mechanism in the United Kingdom whereby the European draft constitutional treaty could be implemented is approval by the House of Commons followed by a referendum of the people of Britain. There is no question of implementing it by the back door.