Quotes About Britain

Little Britain… ever since it first came on… I come here a lot, we have a lot of friends here, my wife used to work with a lot of Brits, so we were always keyed into the hot shows when they first came out. So, I fell in love with Little Britain.

At the moment we are hard-wired into the European markets - 50% of our exports go to Europe - and that has not been good for the UK. So I'm not saying "make Britain entirely dependent on China". I'm saying "let's diversify a bit". When I became chancellor, China was our ninth largest trading partner. This is the world's second biggest economy. China was doing more business with Belgium than it was with Britain.

Britain has been good to the Jews, and the Jews have been good for Britain.

More Irishmen died fighting for Britain in World War I than died fighting against her in all of Ireland's bids for independence combined.

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.

But more than anything else, for the British folks Irish people were all terrorists. So when we went to Britain, it was always a lot of resistance to U2. And that's why we came to America.

There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.

We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. "I claim India for Britain!" They're going "You can't claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!" "Do you have a flag …? "No..." "Well, if you don't have a flag, then you can't have a country. Those are the rules... that I just made up!

There's another way we are getting behind business - by sorting out the banks. Taxpayers bailed you out. Now it's time for you to repay the favour and start lending to Britain's small businesses again.

In vain shall Great Britain confer upon her colonies the free government and liberal principles of legislation, for which she is distinguished, if she do not carry with her the revelations of God.

If democracy is destroyed in Britain, it will be not the communists, Trotskyists or subversives but this House which threw it away. The rights that are entrusted to us are not for us to give away. Even if I agree with everything that is proposed, I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the people of Chesterfield. I just could not do it. It would be theft of public rights.

If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea.

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.

In Italy there are 5 million legal migrants. They're integrated, and they're welcome. The problem of the Muslim presence is increasingly worrying. There are more and more clashes, more and more demands. And I doubt the compatibility of Italian law with Muslim law, because it's not just a religion but a law. And problems can be seen in Great Britain as well as in Germany, so reassessing our coexistence is fundamental.

A ley line is what might be called a field of force, a trail of telluric energy. There are hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, all over Britain, and they've been around since the Stone Age.

I use throughout the term 'liberal' in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that 'liberal' has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control.

We should be working towards a carbon-neutral Britain by 2050. We should be working towards the elimination of petrol-driven motor cars, we should be really radical in what we do - the urgency of the problem is really enormous

Fox hunting, there's big fox hunting thing, there's arguments in Britain about fox hunting. And they go around. They obviously hunt foxes because the foxes, they attack chickens. And posh people have an alliance with chickens just like in the First World War.

We oppress people, we make our victims small wherever they are, whether they are a black girl in a rural community in, say, America or Britain, or whether it's something happening out there in one of the countries of conflict. I mean Sri Lanka, the human rights abuse there is appalling.

The moral of filmmaking in Britain is that you will be screwed by the weather.

Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.

By 18th century standards, they [Great Britain] were the freest, most dynamic, most willing to challenge tradition and authority. They had the highest wages and highest living standard, and probably the most engagement between the populace and the government of any country. Then the United States took those same qualities to the nth degree, and the British were suddenly appeared stodgy and tradition-bound.

In the end it may well be that Britain will be honored by the historians more for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it.

I think it would be great for football in Britain if Pep Guardiola wins leagues and dominates for a while with the way he likes to play and the players he'll bring in.

I want Britain to punch its weight in the European Community.

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

Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker.

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.

In Germany democracy died by the headman's axe. In Britain it can be by pernicious anaemia.

I'll wear no convicts uniform nor meekly serve my time that Britain might brand Irelands fight 800 years of crime.

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.

New Labour was the most short-sighted, self-serving, incompetent, useless, and ineffective government that Britain has ever known.

I would have bet money that Britain would not vote to leave the EU, and I would have been wrong. I would have bet money that Trump would not have been the Republican nominee, and I would have been wrong and I certainly would have bet money that he wouldn't win the election.

We can find common qualities and common values that have made Britain the country it is. Our belief in tolerance and liberty which shines through British history. Our commitment to fairness, fair play and civic duty.

British rule depends upon repression and collaboration and the Irish people should recognise that those who collaborate with Britain in exchange for a slice of the cake will implement British policy and remain silent when Irish people are murdered and oppressed. It is they who are responsible for prolonging the war in Ireland. Without the quislings, without the collaborators, we would already have reached freedom.

Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.

The art critics on some of Britain's newspapers could as easily have been assigned gardening or travel, and been cheerfully employed for life.

I feel the art world in New York has a stronger following than Britain. If you go to a New York art district on a Saturday morning, it will be so busy with families and openings - art is much more ingrained in the culture.

MRSA, which is a kind of super bug mutant, is killing 10,000 people a year in Britain

Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion.

They [The Beatles ] were the first band to write their own songs in Britain because we always just covered American songs before that.

The next few years are going to be horrendous in the UK. The last thing we need is a Somali pirate-style raid on the few wealth creators who still dare to navigate Britain's gale-force waters.

I've put myself forward to be involved. Whether I get picked, we'll have to wait and see. Obviously everybody is excited about it, about the Olympics coming to London and the football being played in different parts of Britain.

Professor Hawking is heralded as 'the genius of Britain,' yet he believes in the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything and that life sprang from non-life. Why should anyone believe Mr. Hawking's writings if he cannot provide evidence for his unscientific belief that out of nothing, everything came?

Britain is famous for being great at inventing and poor at commercializing.

Think of Europe in the 20th century. Two World Wars generated by nationalism. France, Germany, Britain fighting with each other.

If Britain wins wholly, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and perhaps even Bolshevik Russia will disappear.

I have a plan. It entails leading to a fair deal and relationship with the British. We will be reasonable, but we will also negotiate firmly and without gullibility. I believe we must come to an agreement for the people of Britain and the people on the Continent, but not under exclusively British terms.