Quotes About British

The British have their own conception of what constitutes the typical American. He must have a flavor of the Wild West about him. He must do spectacular things. He must not be punctilious about dignity, decorum and other refinements characteristic of the real British gentleman. The Yankee pictured by the Briton must be a bustler. If he is occasionally flagrantly indiscreet in speech and action, then he is so much more surely stamped the genuine article. The most typical American the British ever set their eyes on was, in their judgment, Theodore Roosevelt.

The British were doing crime stories first, but the British thing is a very different thing. There, the stories are about restoring a break in the fabric of society. The American thing has never been worrying about breaks in the fabric of society, but about people doing their job, whether it's police procedurals or criminals or whatever.

No medieval monarch in the whole of British history ever had such power as every modern British Prime Minister has in his or her hands. Nor does any American President have power approaching this

London exists normally in a state of bleach bypass. There's the artistic context of "Blow Up" and "Performance" and all the Sixties and Seventies British films that I grew up on, because I did very much grow up on British films.

I 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.

I 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.

British people are surprised that I'm British!

We did not lack for religious leaders to urge us into "godly" war [...]. All of this was part of a well-financed propaganda campaign on the part of British agents. As usual, the government of the United States was being "run" by the British Secret Intelligence Service.

Today a Scot is leading a British army in France [Field Marshall Douglas Haig], another is commanding the British Grand Fleet at sea [Admiral David Beatty], while a third directs the Imperial General Staff at home [Sir William Roberton]. The Lord Chancellor is a Scot [Viscount Finlay]; so are the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary [Bonar Law and Arthur Balfour]. The Prime Minister is a Welshman [David Lloyd George], and the First Lord of the Admiralty is an Irishman [Lord Carson]. Yet no one has ever brought in a bill to give home rule to England!

I'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 .

Jimmy Greaves and Kenny Dalglish had similar know-how, but Dalglish's knowledge and reading of the game was far superior. He was the most complete footballer in British soccer.

I am a caricature of what British science is about in the way I work.

Red Bull are backing a spinal-injury research charity called Wings For Life, which I am an ambassador for, with a programme called Faces for Charity that will run at this year's British Grand Prix.

This was absolutely an attack on [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair, principally, and the perspective which is really predominant in Europe right now that he's not questioning enough of Mr. Bush's policies.

British actors behave like Europeans; they are also extremely well trained.

I have multiple identities. I'm British. I'm Pakistani. I'm a Muslim. I'm a writer. I'm a father. And each identity has rich overtones. So I must be careful to look at your identity, and that of others, in the same way.

There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.

It is quite untrue that British people don't appreciate music. They may not understand it but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Yeah. Floyd is his batman." His what?" Batman, like in the British army, each officer had a batman, a personal servant." You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don't make you money than anybody I know.

They had bombed London, whether on purpose or not, and the British people and London especially should know that we could hit back. It would be good for the morale of us all.

When I drove for British teams... they called me The Tadpole because I was too small to be a frog.

The 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.

When we strengthen our relations with the Gulf states, when we cooperate with the Arabs, everybody asks if we are looking for a new geopolitical place. But in the Middle East and the Gulf, you can find German, French and British goods everywhere. German relations to these states are very good, as are English and French relations. Does this make them Arab-oriented?

The 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. I've never known a situation like it.

The British capitalize on their accent when they don't want you to know what they're saying. But if you wake them up at 4 A.M., they speak perfect English, the same as we do.

The 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.

One of the marked superiorities the English enjoy over other peoples is their ability to imbue the foreigner with a crippling inferiority complex the moment he sets foot on British soil.

I 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.

The confidence and security of a people can be measured by their attitude toward laxatives. At the high noon of the British sun, soldiers in far-flung outposts of the Empire doctored themselves with "a spoonful o' gunpowder in a cuppa 'ot tea." Purveyors and users of harsh laxatives were not afraid of being thought mean and unfriendly just because their laxatives were. But in America, the need to be nice is so consuming that nobody would dare take a laxative that makes you run up the stairs two at a time, pushing others aside and yelling, "Get out of the way!

British 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,.

The peril of the hour moved the British to tremendous exertions, just as always in a moment of extreme danger things can be done which had previously been thought impossible. Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.

The 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.

I'm a big fan of British cinema; I think we make some unbelievably brilliant films, but they can quite often have a dark feel.

British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.

The British press are a group of unremitting scumbags. And sometimes they use that scumbaggery to good ends, and often not.

I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.

The British were keen for 30 caliber guns, did not believe in daylight bombing. American experts said 30 caliber was not enough; we had to have 50 caliber, also said daylight bombing was right provided the planes attacked in formation, with 50 caliber guns.

When my father arrived in Kenya, he had found the Kikuyu way of life similar to that of the British at the time the Romans invaded England 2,000 years ago.

Look, I've always said from the word go many years ago that I felt the whole bonus culture, they need to think very carefully about being detached from the rest of the British public.

I spent quite a lot of time pissing off my friends because I could get girls with a British accent, despite the fact that I was tubby and, like, not very cool.

When it comes to the British monarchy, I prefer to be seduced by an image than presented with a real person. It's kind of a Warhol thing.

Kenya is rapidly developing its industry and manufacturing, and its cultural identity as a new country. We had a humongous history pre-British, and when we were colonized and violently reshuffled, we had to decide who we were again. We couldn't rest on the stories and the cultures of our great-grandparents.

There's always peripheral things that you like that you don't know, but starting with whatever his British influences are, are some of my favourite artists, and the American things are what I grew up on as well. In the end, for me, it's those foundations of the music business - those things that are a lot of the foundations of what music today is. You can hear a bit of all of those things that we talk about in almost all music today.

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.

The fact is, some of the most respected scientific bodies in the world, including Codex Alimentarius (jointly run by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations), the American Medical Association, the British Medical Association, and the American Public Health Association, have stated that more research needs to be done on GMOs through premarket safety assessments before we can truthfully determine their safety.

Even though the Olympics take place during Ramadan, some Muslim athletes said they will not fast during games. Then, after sampling the British food, they said, on second thought, fasting sounds good.

Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge,” Aomame said. “Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire’s budget deficits. It has no moral significance.

I am confident that the British people will not be intimidated by terrorism.