Popular quotes about British! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 15
Now, the United States' response, the western response to this is a continuation of the appeasement that was started back in the '50s with Eisenhower when Iran seized western oil companies. The Americans, the British, and the Israelis, as I remember, launched an attack to try to reclaim it and - or at least the British and the Israelis did and Eisenhower vetoed it.
Leonard PeikoffNo British Government ever will and ever can risk the bones of a British grenadier.
Austen ChamberlainArmed struggle is a necessary and morally correct form of resistance in the Six Counties against a government whose presence is rejected by the vast majority of the Irish people There are those who tell us that the British government will not be moved by armed struggle. As has been said before, the history of Ireland and of British colonial involvement throughout the world tells us that they will not be moved by anything else.
Gerry AdamsWe are a British nation with British characteristics. Every country can take some small minorities and in many ways they add to the richness and variety of this country. The moment the minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened.
Margaret ThatcherI love the introduction of international managers and players into the Premier League. However Manchester United's principles through their history had always been: they will appoint a British manager, there will always promote youth, they will always play a certain style of football, they will always look to entertain. So to me the idea of appointing a British manager, David Moyes, appointing somebody who deserved that opportunity to step up, was the right principle.
Gary NevilleHad we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.
Mahatma GandhiThe most foreign fighters in Iraq are wearing British and American uniforms. The level of self-delusion is bordering frankly on the racist. The vast majority of the people of Iraq are against the occupation of Iraq by the American and British forces.
George GallowayI think I went through early years of my career sort of thinking, "Well, maybe I'm just not British enough." And I always remember my father saying to me, "Don't think you're English, because however English you feel, some Englishman is going to remind you that you're not." Now, for him it must have been a much more acute experience, because he immigrated to England. I was born there, so I kind of felt I had the right to assume that I was British, but it's true. The English are a very warm and welcoming people, but there's a streak in there that reminds you, occasionally.
Alfred MolinaEnding the slave trade was contrary to British economic interests. For all its limitations and hypocrisies - British slavery itself, of course, still continued to exist - I still think it was a great moment in human history.
Henry Louis GatesCalifornians don't have that marvelous British cynicism, but then the British can be so patronizing at times.
Alex KingstonI once found myself conspiring with a British Cabinet Minister as to how we might persuade Her Majesty's Treasury to cough up more money for the British Travel advertising in America. Said he, "Why does any American in his senses spend his vacation in the cold damp of an English summer when he could equally well bask under Italian skies? I can only suppose that your advertising is the answer." Damn right.
David OgilvyThe trouble with the British is that they are not interested in ideas. If Jesus came back today and offered to speak for an hour on British television, they would say, "What! Another talking head?
John CleeseWe talk about the American way, the British way. If we had any sense, we would know that there is no American way, no British way. There is only one way - the scientific way that cuts across racial lines with international boundaries.
Moses CoadyThe trouble with tea is that originally it was quite a good drink. So a group of the most eminent British scientists put their heads together and made complicated biological experiments to find a way of spoiling it. To the eternal glory of British science, their labour bore fruit.
George MikesThe 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.
BayleyCountries are different. They make different choices. We cannot harmonise everything. For example, it is neither right nor necessary to claim that the integrity of the single market, or full membership of the European Union requires the working hours of British hospital doctors to be set in Brussels irrespective of the views of British parliamentarians and practitioners.
David CameronIt is not for us to give an assessment to what happened, but in our opinion the reputation of British science, the reputation of the British government, and the reputation of the title 'Sir' has sustained heavy damage.
Andrey IllarionovThere are cases - for example, the American Revolution. George Washington's army lost just about every battle with the British, who had a much better army. The war was basically won by guerrilla forces that managed to undermine the British occupation.
Noam ChomskyThe British are coming, the British are coming! Mr. President! We need the National Guard! We need as many men as you can spare because we are killing the Patriots! So call the dogs off! Send the National Guard, please! They need emergency help! Please! Help!
Shannon SharpeGermany will continue to play a central - perhaps even a more important - role in the European Union. I think that we will all miss the pragmatic approach of the British, however, particularly in those long nights of negotiation.
Jean-Claude JunckerJoe Calzaghe is next. If he gets himself out that armchair, gets himself back in the gym, let's have a fight for the British fans and the rest of the world.
Carl FrochWe must assist the British in the war as if there were no White Paper and we must resist the White Paper as if there were no war.
David Ben-GurionI would love to play a British character one day. My accent wavers between Scottish and Irish very easily, though.
Chris LilleyI am sure that the two main forms of English, American English and British English, separated geographically from the beginning and severed politically since 1776, are continuing to move apart, and that existing elements of linguistic dissimilarity between them will intensify as time goes on, notwithstanding the power of the cinema, TV, Time Magazine, and other two-way gluing and fuelling devices.
Robert BurchfieldBecause half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray, to not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.
Edmund BurkeI want to be taken playfully, not seriously - not with a long British face, but with beautiful laughter. Your laughter, your playfulness is the recognition that you have understood me. Your seriousness shows that you have misunderstood me, you have missed it - because seriousness is nothing but sickness. It is another name of sadness; it is a shadow of death. And I am all for life. If it is needed for your laughter, your dance, even to reject me, then reject me - but don't reject the dance and the song and the life, because that is my teaching.
RajneeshAt 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'm a big fan of British journalists like 'The Independentโs Robert Fisk, but it's hard to find voices like his in the U.S.
Jackson BrowneBy adopting the 'free trade,' or British, system, we place ourselves side by side with the men who have ruined Ireland and India, and are now poisoning and enslaving the Chinese people.
Henry Charles CareyThe 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 JudtI 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.
John OliverThe Road To Serfdom was written during WWII, and basically it's an anti-Nazi, anti-communist thing, but also it's an anti-Conservative and anti-Labor-party thing aimed at the British. He was an Austrian, writing in Britain. And I feel like now, I guess, everybody pays lip service to libertarian - and, indeed, many conservative - ideas, and yet they keep moving forward with an increasingly bureaucratic state. It shows itself in all sorts of little ways.
P. J. O'RourkeNo 'rules.' What are you, British or something? I guess I'm too nice... No wonder people take advantage of me.
Alfonso CuaronI am not a British isolationist. I don't just want a better deal for Britain. I want a better deal for Europe too.
David CameronI got bored and then joined the British SAS. It was five very exciting years of my life, and then I'd always had this passion for swimming, so started swimming around the world, in some of the most exotic and distant and dangerous locations.
Lewis PughThe British climate, although it is very wet, it is quite mild in winter. We don't get these severe - generally don't get severe winters.
Andy GoldsworthyThere is an honourable tradition in British public life that those charged with authority at the top of an organisation should accept responsibility for what happens in that organisation. I am therefore writing to the prime minister today to tender my resignation as chairman of the BBC.
Gavyn DaviesIn the UK cycling was very popular until the end of the 1950's but it really lost out to our love affair with the car. Regaining a culture where cycling is seen as an everyday part of life requires time and effort. Of course in some British towns it never really went away - just look at Oxford and Cambridge. In other places, where the car has been king for many decades, it takes more time.
Adrian BellMy father is Jewish, and I look exactly like him My mother is British, but she's of French extraction.
Joan CollinsA Jew who converted, who simulated, was, at least in some periods, safe. Hitler in the beginning did not want to kill all the Jews but he wanted us to have a Germany free of Jews. If America had allowed Jews to come in, the British had accepted Jews from Palestine, they were safe.
Elie WieselThe Death Star is just full of British actors opening doors and going,Oh... I... oh... What is it Lieutenant Sebastian? It's just the Rebels, sir... they're here. My God, man! Do they want tea? No, I think they're after something a bit more than that, sir. I don't know what it is, but they've brought a flag. Damn, that's dash cunning of them.
Eddie Izzard