Popular quotes about British! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
I know Im British. I havent spent much time in the U.K., but my parents are British, my family heritage is British, so if I wasnt British, what would I be? I am British.
Chris FroomeThe British press hate a winner who's British. They don't like any British man to have balls as big as a cow's like I have.
Nigel BennThe number of those who have to be assimilated to the majority is not too high. It remains small compared with the numbers of the majority. But there is one thing - and that is the main reason for this digression - that French and British have in common: to this day they have an immense pride in being French, in being British. The fact that in the meantime both have come down to earth a little has not yet affected their pride in their own nationality and the fact that, if I may express it that way, they are mutual admiration societies: how fine the British are, how fine the French are.
Norbert EliasIt is a fallacy to believe that a Republic of any kind can be won through the shackled Free State. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The Free State is British created and serves British Imperialist interests. It is the buffer erected between British Capitalism and the Irish Republic.
Liam MellowsWhat the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.
Will SelfI 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.
Winston ChurchillNo British Government ever will and ever can risk the bones of a British grenadier.
Austen ChamberlainThere are actually quite high profile British TV star cameos in it that you probably wouldn't even notice, that the British wouldn't even notice, let alone the American audience.
Simon PeggThe British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.
Will SelfSavagery was a word that Westerners used to, again, to consciously differentiate them from non-Westerners, to assert that superiority, that cultural superiority. It goes back to the British Empire, and again, you know, what was the purpose of the British Empire? To bring civilization to the savage no matter where they were, whether it was India or Asia or Australia or whatever. It's that civilizing mission that characterizes so much of the history of Western colonialism.
Robert A. Williams, Jr.Human beings are many-layered creatures, and do not succumb to the hegemony of others as easily as historians and politicians sometimes imply. Those Welsh, Scottish and Anglo-Irish individuals who became part of the British Establishment in this period did not in the main sell out in the sense of becoming Anglicised look-alikes. Instead, they became British in a new and intensely profitable fashion, while remaining in their own minds and behavior Welsh, or Scottish, or Irish aswell.
Linda ColleyThere is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgusting, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimous--secondly, because of its gross irrationality. We know the British to bear us little but ill will--we know that, in no case do they utter unbiased opinions of American books . . . we know all this, and yet, day after day, submit our necks to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that emanates from the fatherland.
Edgar Allan PoeThe people in the southern provinces have no interest whatsoever to see British forces leave because they're providing security, stability, structure, and relations have always been good ... really between the British forces and the local Iraqis in this area.
Hoshyar ZebariAmong the handful of British diplomats and military men aware of their government's secret policy in the Middle East-that the Arabs were being encouraged to fight and die on the strength of promises that had already been traded away-were many who regarded that policy as utterly shameful, an affront to British dignity.
Scott Anderson[Congress] is not the British Parliament, and I hope it never will become the British Parliament... Are we going to bring the president in here and have a question period like the prime minister has in Great Britain?
Trent LottThe laws of England will protect the rights of British subjects, and give a remedy for a grievance committed by one British subject upon another, in whatever country that may be done.
BayleyIt is very clear from the historical record that without British help neither Wahhabism nor the House of Saud would be in existence today. Wahhabism is a British-inspired fundamentalist movement in Islam. Through its defense of the House of Saud, the US also supports Wahhabism directly and indirectly regardless of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Wahhabism is violent, right wing, ultra-conservative, rigid, extremist, reactionary, sexist, and intolerant.
Andre VltchekThe people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race. They are few in number but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their own allegiance. They way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown. It is the wish of the British people and the duty of Her Majesty's Government to do everything that we can to uphold that right. That will be our hope and our endeavour, and, I believe, the resolve, of every Member of this House.
Margaret ThatcherI've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .
George PackerBut 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.
BonoI dont like Jews. Or colored folk. Or natives, now that you mention it...I bet you like Catholics. Cant stand them either. Nor women, Fabians, Socialists, homosexuals, Asians, or British.
HerbertAt the next election he'll offer the British public an alternative that provides weight and substance and seriousness in a political debate that is, frankly, increasingly obsessed with modishness and flim-flam.
Paddy AshdownI think it's sort of a rite of passage for a British actor to try and get the American accent and have a good crack at doing that.
Orlando BloomThe British are absolutely hung up on class, and whenever they start to really - class for the English is like sex for Americans: They start to shake all over when the subject comes up.
Gore VidalI've had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press.
Paddy AshdownThe Second World War had a precipitating effect in that it discredited the empires, as well as bankrupting them. Not only could you no longer, if you were a colonial subject of France in Africa, look to France as a model of power and influence and civility after what had happened in the war. Nor could the French any longer afford to run their empire. And nor could the British, although they were not discredited in the way that the French were.
Tony JudtEstablishing a client state in Iraq would significantly enhance that strategic power, a matter of great significance for the future. As Zbigniew Brzezinski observed, it would provide the US with "critical leverage" of its European and Asian rivals, a conception with roots in early post-war planning. These are substantial reasons for aggression - not unlike those of the British when they invaded and occupied Iraq over 80 years earlier, at the dawn of the oil age.
Noam ChomskyThe British have been particularly shy about the issues of financial regulation, and attentive only to the interests of the City - hence their reluctance to see the introduction of a tax on financial transactions and tax harmonisation in Europe.
Francois HollandeThe British could leave and half India wouldn't notice us leaving just as they didn't notice us arriving. All our reforms of administration might be reforms on the moon for all it has to do with them.
J. G. FarrellBritish business is disappointed that the MPC felt unable to act more boldly to counter the worsening economic circumstances and the sharp slowdown in the pace of economic activity,.
David FrostWe have lost the good old British spirit. Instead we have American journalism and black-shirted buffoons making a cheap imitation of ice-cream sellers.
Oswald MosleyAlthough socialism is widely held by the establishment to be outdated, the things that are most popular in British society today are little pockets of socialism, where areas of life have been excluded from the crude operation of market forces and are protected for the benefit of the community
Tony BennMy father is Jewish, and I look exactly like him My mother is British, but she's of French extraction.
Joan CollinsFirst off I want to thank God, because he's the one I look up to, he's graced my life with opportunities that I know are not of my hand or any other human kind. He has shown me that it's a scientific fact that gratitude reciprocates. In the words of the late (British actor) Charlie Laughton, who said, 'When you got God, you got a friend and that friend is you.'
Matthew McConaugheyBack in those days, all us skinny white British kids were trying to look cool and sound black. And there was Hendrix, the ultimate in black cool. Everything he did was natural and perfect.
Ronnie WoodI thought, If people are going to write about what I'm wearing, then I would wear young British designers who need the publicity.
Emma WatsonI had a lot of anger against the way things 'should be done' - conforming to social norms, ticking boxes to gain acceptance. Frustration at the pointlessness and predictability of smalltalk. Oh and a lot of anger about tea, which the British seem to use to avoid actually saying anything.
Rupert FriendIt is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.
C. L. R. JamesThese two great organisations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some affairs for mutual and general advantage. I do not view the process with any misgivings. I could not stop it if I wished. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands, and better days.
Winston ChurchillAmong the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.
William GoldingThere's something whimsical, satirical, and silly about British humor, which Americans have always enjoyed, and lots of us come over here because we have an audience of people who enjoy it.
Milo YiannopoulosThe British Labour Party has always had a very strong "Atlanticist component," with an obsequiousness to American policies, and Blair represents this wing. He's clearly obsessed with Iraq. He has to be because the overwhelming majority of the people of Britain oppose a military action.
John Pilger