Quotes About Britain

My first guiding principle is this: willing and active co-operation between independent sovereign states. Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality.

I came to office with one deliberate intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society - from a give-it-to-me, to a do-it-yourself nation. A get-up-and-go, instead of a sit-back-and-wait-for-it Britain.

They have it wrong in asking if Schroeder favors Britain over France, or France over Britain. Schroeder favors Germany. That is what we all have to understand.

I was talking to my publisher in Britain and was told here we are - we are sixty million people and we reckon only four hundred thousand people in Britain really read.

There's unrecognizable change happening in Britain. The life prospects and job prospects, particularly of working-class people, have been severely dented. Without anyone being asked.

I think until Britain acknowledges just how much of a presence black people had here before the Sixties, then there are certain stories that are not going to be inclusive of what I have to offer.

I shall endeavor to marshal British opinion against a course of action which would bring in my opinion the greatest evils upon the people of India, upon the people of Great Britain and upon the British Empire itself.

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.

All the evidence here, for example, in Britain, is that migrants, particularly from the rest of Europe, who come here contribute far more in taxes.

A man is allowed sufficient freedom of thought, provided he knows how to choose his subject properly.... But the scene is changed as you come homeward, and atheism or treason may be the names given in Britain to what would be reason and truth if asserted in China.

In America, there seems to be more focus on the idea that it's important to do things differently. In Britain, it's not an issue.

I'm not sure it pays to do anything remotely public in Britain. It's such a spiteful society. People seem to enjoy making your life hard for the sake of it.

We had to do what we had to do - Britain is great again.

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

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

My preoccupation has been from the very beginning that I believe that the "Brexit" referendum result is the most disastrous peacetime result that we've seen in Britain.

Stop thinking that if Britain or America or Russia or the West or whatever becomes superior, then we'll beat them, and then we'll all have a rest and live happily ever after. That doesn't work.

I defy my honored opponents to give me the name of a single man imprisoned in the United States, Great Britain, or West Germany for being an atheist. But in former communist countries, millions of our Christian brothers and sisters in faith have passed through jails or been killed. Who has fought for freedom and obtained it - atheists or Christians?

One person I do feel a little sorry for, though, is the Archbishop of Canterbury, the most important clergyman in Britain and he's only got two lousy palaces to live in. What sort of life is that for a man of God? I bet if Jesus came back, even he'd be embarrassed for him; I bet he wouldn't be able to look him in the eye.

If you look at the First World War, the Kaiser was actually, actively buying a lot of the armaments from Britain! in the years, in the run-up to the First World War. And I mean, there was a connection there. He was, indeed, Queen Victoria's grandson. You know, they were all related, all these royal families.

But I am an optimist about Britain; and the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is not that the optimist believes the world is wonderful and the pessimist believes it's beset by challenges; the difference is the pessimist believes we will be defeated by them; the optimist thinks the challenges can be overcome.

When I learnt, however, that in 1911 there had been twenty-one regular feminist periodicals in Britain, that there was a feminist book shop, a woman's press, and a woman's bank run by and for women, I could no longer accept that the reason I knew almost nothing about women of the past was because there were so few of them, and they had done so little.

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

People who believe in 'universal health care' show remarkably little interest - usually none - in finding out what that phrase turns out to mean in practice, in those countries where it already exists, such as Britain, Sweden or Canada. For one thing, 'universal health care' in these countries means months of waiting for surgery that Americans get in a matter of weeks or even days.

Colonialism is an idea born in the West that drives Western countries - like France, Italy, Belgium, Great Britain - to occupy countries outside of Europe.

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.

I want Britain to be the home of successful competitive and stable financial services.

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

I'm a great supporter of the European Union. I didn't support entry to the Euro, not because I'm against it in principle but because I didn't think it was economically right for Britain. But that doesn't make me any less pro-European.

I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan.

Somewhat by historical happenstance the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China - also were the original five countries to have nuclear weapons.

Britain is producing some of the worst films in the world. Our film industry is desperate to be part of America, and we just churn out flaccid imitations of bad films over there.

This rationale, which justified the mixed constitution of Great Britain, might have made some sense in 1776, but by 1787 most American thinkers had come to believe that all parts of their balanced governments represented in one way or another the sovereign people. They had left the Aristotelian idea of mixed estates - monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy - way behind. [John] Adams had not, and his stubbornness on this point caused him no end of trouble.

Virtually every war fought since the Act of Union had gone badly at some stage, but before 1783 none had ended in defeat. Nor would any major war in which Britain was involved after this date end in defeat. Those who are curious about this country's peculiar social and political stability probably need look no further than this for essential cause.

I was the first home-grown sex symbol, rather like Britain`s naughty seaside postcards. When Marilyn Monroe`s first film was shown here [The Asphalt Jungle (1950)], a columnist actually wrote: `How much like our Diana Dors she is`.

I would like to invite the citizens of Great Britain and the citizens of the U.S. and the citizens of the world to come here and walk freely through the streets of Venezuela, to talk to anyone they want, to watch television, to read the papers. We are building a true democracy, with human rights for everyone, social rights, education, health care, pensions, social security, and jobs.

I know in Britain with 'Doctor Who' all the classic actors, and the people who you'd really want to, work on the show. I like that the fact that 'Torchwood' has actors that want to be involved from the stage. It has raised our game, and I'm just happy for good actors who want to be in sci-fi shows who love the genre.

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.

While I'm sure people in Britain have money worries, they don't have them like the French do. The French, however much money they have, are worried. They're a very stressed people. It seems to be a very essential component of the national psyche.

I think Brexit's going to be a wonderful thing for Britain. I think when it irons out, you're gonna have your own identity and you're going to have the people that you want in your country and you're going to be able to make free trade deals without having somebody watching you and what you're doing.

Humans who see something different than them want to hate it and tear it down. Britain had a government policy that allowed prejudice to destroy someone's life, and today there is still homophobia at home and elsewhere, like Russia or Greece. It's still a relevant discussion. While women have it better than the 1940s or '50s, sexism is still prevalent.

We have to see that we're a part of each other, and we have to take care of each other. The reason why they have universal health care in Canada and Britain, these other places? Because they believe if one suffers, everybody suffers.

I think Britain needs to get out there on the world stage and make itself heard. And for much of my political career, there has been a sense of retreat from the world stage because of what happened in the Iraq War.

By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.

China is incredibly important to the future of mankind. For me, this is something that we all need to have intelligent discussions about in America, in Britain, in Europe. We need to really understand that their destiny and our destiny, Africa's destiny, etc., are all completely tied in. The argument for getting to know your neighbors is very compelling.

We are redefining and we are restating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution ... The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or outdated methods on either side of industry.

Jacobitism involved much more than a debate about the merits of a particular dynasty. Men and women were well aware that its success was almost certain to involved them in civil war. And the more politically educated knew that the Stuart Pretender was a pawn in a worldwide struggle for commercial and imperial primacy between Britain and France.