Quotes About British

The British are proud of their ability to create a muddle and then muddle through all difficulties. I must shake the British pride: muddle is not an exclusively British institution. Read descriptions, for instance, of the over-organized, wonderfully systematic and "thorough" German war machine during the last war.

Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been different, but the result would once again be disaster. What happened in America was really round two of those wars - the civil war of the British Empire, with the Hanoverians playing the part of the Stuarts, and the Americans the heirs of the revolutionaries, of Cromwell and of William III, the inheritors of a true British liberty, that had somehow got lost in its own motherland.

If we don't stop behaving like the British Empire, we will end up like the British Empire.

I guess, on my list, going back to some old American stuff and British stuff that I used to love in the '80s, would be a British show called Dad's Army, which recently just turned into a movie.

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.

Simply asking the British people to carry on accepting a European settlement over which they have had little choice is a path to ensuring that when the question is finally put - and at some stage it will have to be - it is much more likely that the British people will reject the EU.

Everyone the world over talks about British actors and British talent and I think thats because we were trained - until now - in theatre.

People say, "How do you get into the British film industry?" There is no British film industry, there are just people making films and finding their own way. It's not like in the States where there are studios and there's an actual infrastructure to it; there's just nothing here. You make it from scratch a lot of the time.

More than 55,000 men from Bomber Command lost their lives, of whom 38,000 were British. That's one in 10 of all the British servicemen lost in the Second World War. It beggars belief that there has not been some recognition for what they gave until now.

My folks were English. They were too poor to be British. I still have a bit of British in me. In fact, my blood type is solid marmalade.

We Scots have a fierce pride in the things we do that others can never appreciate. I am the British No. 1, but I would prefer to be the British No. 1 from Scotland every time.

The 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!

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

I've just finished a series of Olivia Manning novels. She's best known for two trilogies: Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy. The six novels are continuous and contain the same set of characters. They are based on Manning's experiences in Eastern Europe and Egypt during the Second World War. Each novel is a wonderful picture of the peculiar British expatriate culture and what was happening during the war. She's one of those brilliant women who write very well about domestic relationships. All the books are slim, and it's easy to gallop through them.

The British vice is overthinking before we speak, which is really annoying. I love the way that, in America, people are more straightforward. The American vice would be sometimes speaking too loudly. You can always hear American people on the trains!

In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.

I considered the British as our natural enemies, and as the only nation on earth who wished us ill from the bottom of their souls. And I am satisfied that were our continent to be swallowed up by the ocean, Great Britain would be in a bonfire from one end to the other.

What did it mean to be called “lord”? I’ll assume you’ve never had the honor, since I doubt any of you happen to be British royalty. (And, if by chance you are, then let me say, “Hello, Your Majesty! Welcome to my stupid book. Can I borrow some cash?”)

We now have political chaos. We've got parties in Ireland saying they want to merge with Northern Ireland. You've got parties in Scotland saying you want to leave the U.K. You've got the Spanish government saying it would like to take ownership of Gibraltar, which is a British overseas territory... So just the politics of this is a mess.

I'm a big fan of British journalists like 'The Independent”s Robert Fisk, but it's hard to find voices like his in the U.S.

Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores.

ID can be hijacked, and cards can be faked. All of the 9/11 terrorists had fake IDs, yet they still got on the planes. If the British national ID card can't be faked, it will be the first on the planet.

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

Establishing 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.

In the period of '60s to the '90s, British art schools were small, and the number of student was small. The personal contact was great.

I'm not Tom Cruise. Very few British actors are. If you look at the body of work I've done it's pretty obvious I'm not going to make a 'Mission: Impossible.'

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 people still wear clothes. By clothes I mean actual clothes: jackets and shirts and ties and suits. The spirit of Beau Brummell is still visible. English men make an effort. We’ve lost that in the US. Everyone is more concerned with being comfortable.

I grew up near the sea in British Columbia and San Francisco, and lived in Malibu and Fiji for years. I get uncomfortable being too far inland.

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.

Gorgonised me from head to foot With a stony British stare.

Although 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

American television constantly tries to co-op British comedy and create their own version of it. Most of the time it doesn't work; obviously, in the case of 'The Office,' it did. But a lot of times, it doesn't really work.

My father is Jewish, and I look exactly like him My mother is British, but she's of French extraction.

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.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

Back 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.

I find a difference in British spy fiction and American spy fiction. In the American version, it's more militaristic, partly because the CIA has more of the military makeup. Whereas MI6 is more of a cerebral, intelligence-based, relationship-based service, i.e., all they do is recruit people to get information out of them.

Dad loved movies and I grew up with British comedy. My ultimate favourite is Peter Sellers.

My job is to support businesses, that means promoting British commerce in the big emerging markets that have been neglected in the past. It means keeping Britain open to inward investors, trade and skilled workers. It means cutting red tape which is suffocating growing companies which create jobs.

I guess the most interesting thing that people think is I'm English. They think that I live in England and have a British accent. When they talk to me, at first they go, "Man, you have a great American accent," and I go, "No, no, no, this is my accent. I don't do accents." And then they're really disappointed, and they try to punch me.

On the Northern Ireland question, for instance, the British and Irish governments prohibit media contact with members of the IRA, but we have always gone ahead, believing in the right to information.

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.

Just as it wouldn't be right to only to have an economic dialogue with China, equally you shouldn't restrict your dialogue solely to issues around, say, human rights. You can raise all those issues, and that is what reflects a mature discussion. So I don't think essentially we have to choose between being partners in China's economic development and being proud defenders of British values.

The most conservative man in this world is the British trade unionist when you want to change him.

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.

Afrikaans is my first language, although you would never know, as my English accent has more of an American-British thing going on from all my years of travelling.

I have a dialect myself; it's more pronounced, because I have studied theatre and been in England. It's half-British, half-Indian.