Quotes About British

I have no idea what a British sensibility or a British sense of humor is. I have no concept of what that is. I have no concept of what American sensibility is. I was born in Great Britain, but I was only there for six months, and we moved to Belgium, where I grew up. I love Britain, I lived there for nine years doing shows and things, but I don't know what a British sensibility is. I'd like to have someone tell me what an American sensibility is.

What 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.

I think the British industry is set up to support British film, if we make films that enable them to support it. If you don't make a commercial film, distributors can't get behind it. If they don't get behind it, the film doesn't do well.

Every British Subject born on the continent of America, or in any other of the British dominions, is by the law of God and nature, by the common law, and by act of parliament, (exclusive of all charters from the crown) entitled to all the natural, essential, inherent and inseparable rights of our fellow subjects in Great- Britain.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

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.

Tell the British people if the Iraqis are subjected to aggression or humiliation they would fight bravely. Just as the British people did in the Second World War and we will defend our country as they defended their country each in its own way. The Iraqis don't wish war but if war is imposed upon them - if they are attacked and insulted - they will defend themselves. They will defend their country, their sovereignty and their security.

I went to a British Council event a while back and there were lots of German professors of literature. About half of them were convinced I had a German sense of humour and the other half were sure it was British. They are probably still arguing about it now.

Nigel Farage, even if you don`t follow British politics, he`s a British politician but you may recognize him from his frequent visits to the United States, for example, his time at Trump Tower. You may recognize him from his time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump.

Land Grant College Act is the jewel of Republican reform. It had not occurred to any other country to educate their farmers and workers. When the British studied the reasons for American success in 1851, the consensus was that Americans workers were well educated. So they didn't oppose progress the way British workers did.

I'd like to see a much more open Monarchy, myself. I used to think they were completely useless and we should get rid of them. I don't necessarily feel that way anymore. I'm still ambivalent, I still loathe the British class system, and the Royal family are the apex of the British class system.

My mother's family came from the British West Indies. And my father's family came from, well, my father's father came from the Montana/South Dakota area. They were Blackfoot Indian.

The British keep employing me, and that makes me like them. It also makes me think they're very intelligent.

His scowl returned. "Why, if they're supposed to be Greek, are all of them speaking with an English accent?" She laughed. "Didn't you know that British is, like, the universal 'foreign' language in Hollywood? They use it in any movie where they want to have a foreign feel to it, regardless of where it's set

If the British think they can simply detach from the continent and sail towards the USA or China, then they are mistaken.

I really wouldn't want to live in America. I found New York claustrophobic and dirty. I missed England when I was there, simple things like smells and the British sense of humor.

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.

They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.

Rugby is a game for the mentally deficient... That is why it was invented by the British. Who else but an Englishman could invent an oval ball?

The maxim of the British people is 'business as usual.'

I 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.

To be able to hold all four majors - the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, PGA - all concurrently I think is the Grand Slam. But a lot of people have a different opinions on that. People think you have to win it in the same calendar year.

I live in London and I am a British subject, although I do write in Spanish, of course

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 was brought up on choirs and brass bands. They formed the music of my childhood. When I heard the Treorchy Male Choir at the Royal Variety Performance it brought back such happy memories. You have your own eminent place in the history of British music. You stand for excellence in a great tradition and your work for charity is both an example and an inspiration.

The British vice is overthinking before we speak, which is really annoying. I love the way that, in America, people are more straightforward.

I'm getting comfortable with West Coast style, which is more laid-back than British style.

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!

The habit of a midwinter festivity had come by the dawn of history (and probably very long before) to seem a natural one to the British, and not one to be eradicated by changes of political or religious fashion. ... It was general custom in pagan Europe to decorate spaces with greenery and flowers for festivals, attested wherever records have survived.

When I'm lying drunk at an airport the press call me Irish... but when I win an Oscar, I'm classified as British.

There 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.

I am confident that in the end freedom and democracy will prevail over terror and tyranny. We will win this war on terror - and when we do Americans, the British, Iraqis, and people around the world will be more secure.

I think it would be a problem if Hollywood was casting British actors only as villains; if that were the case, then certainly there would be cause for concern.

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

I'm the guy doing calisthenics. I'm doing jumping jacks and deep knee bends. I work out like a British person.

Women need to have access to counseling services in the way that American or British women can have if something really bad or upsetting happens to them.

I work three days at home, and two days in the British Library or the London Library, just to get out of the house and hide from the children.

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.

Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.

The British feel of blues has been hard, rather than emotional. Far too much emphasis on 12 bar, too little attention to words, far too little originality.

To collude in the minimisation of British history on the grounds of its imagined irrelevance to our rebranded national future, or from a suspicion that it does no more than recycle patriotic pieties unsuited to a global marketplace, would be an act of appallingly self-inflicted collective memory loss.

When you have energy companies like Shell and British Petroleum, both of which are perhaps represented in this room, saying there is a problem with excess carbon dioxide emission, I think we ought to listen.

There's this British elegance that we, at times, have really missed in the States. We've always been more of a sportswear culture.

It would be a blunder of the first magnitude for the British to be a party, in any way whatsoever, to the division of India.

I think Bond the character is distinct: He's British, he has a certain code that he lives by, he's incorruptible... he's a classical hero, but he's also fallible. He has inner demons, inner conflicts, and he's a romantic.

To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.

...He went to Scotland and studied under Lister...("Lister was persecuted by the British Medical Association. He was threatened with having his license revoked.") Yet in Lister's hospital virtually no one died as a result of operations because Lister had developed a carbolic acid wash and disinfectant. Dr. Keen came back from Scotland...He was referred to as a crazy Listerite.....He was denied an opportunity to practice in every hospital in Philadelphia.

My hobbies are cooking and gardening, especially growing orchids. I love soccer, my husband and I support a British team called Chelsea, and I also enjoy tennis. We have 3 cats.