Quotes About British

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 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.

If the British government is prepared to say that the Unionists will not have a veto over British government policy and that guns, vetoes and injustices will all be left outside the door, then there is no good reason why talks cannot take place in an appropriate atmosphere.

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.

No British politician has ever been more despised by the British people than Margaret Thatcher.

Among 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.

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.

One would have thought that if there was one cause in the world which the Conservative party would have hastened to defend, it would be the cause of the British Empire in India ... Our fight is hard. It will also be long ... But win or lose, we must do our duty. If the British people are to lose their Indian Empire, they shall do so with their eyes open.

The wrongful arrest of tens of thousands of British Muslims after the September 11 attacks can be explained by the very poor intelligence the police had, and, just possibly, excused by the fact that a terrorist action in Britain linked to British Muslims would have been hugely damaging.

I'm British - ostensibly British - but I don't know where I really belong, you know?

I am closer to the pacifist side, in that I think that the British response to German aggression, which was to try to starve the Continent into a state of revolt and to terrorize German civilians with bombing raids, was part of the total catastrophe.

Through its imperialist system Britain brought about untold suffering of millions of people. And this is an historical fact. To be able to admit this would increase the respect, you know, which we have for British institutions.

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!

I think sensitive is the wrong description of me. I'm British, actually, so quite bad at expressing myself in conversation, as any ex-girlfriend will tell you. I'm probably emotionally stunted.

I do not wonder that British youth is in revolt against the morbid doctrine that nothing matters but the equal sharing of miseries; that what used to be called the submerged tenth can only be rescued by bringing the other nine-tenths down to their le.

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 don't think the British carry a historical consciousness either.

That's the one thing I say about the great British shows. You know, I see it on the series on HBO where the season is shortened to like 12 or 6 or whatever it is. You know there's a reason why there's a quality behind that. Because I think the writers as well as the crew and the cast do get burnt out after doing continuous episodes after and over and it feels like a factory rather than something of a creative process. And we get tapped out. That's just my opinion.

Let's as this House send a very clear message to British Muslims that we value you, we value your contribution, and we will take this petition very seriously.

Paul Revere was warning the British about gun control, and George Washington apparently was crossing the Delaware to bomb an abortion clinic.

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.

In British culture, redheads get teased at school. But I've grown up enough to realize I love my hair.

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.

The place was so British, I wouldn't have been surprised if the mice wore monocles.

In the British Special Air Service, combat fitness is all about running.

I am Scottish. I am also British.

The British tend to shy away from the spotlight. We don't like being singled out in any way, and I think that is something which is important for me to learn to do.

I wanted to be a great white hunter, a prospector for gold, or a slave trader. But then, when I was eight, my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers, beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.

Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.

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.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

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

Parliamentary democracy is, in truth, little more than a means of securing a periodical change in the management team, which is then allowed to preside over a system that remains in essence intact. If the British people were ever to ask themselves what power they truly enjoyed under our political system they would be amazed to discover how little it is

In 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.

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

The British press isn't as vicious as it used to be, and these days it's sort of cool to care again. Everyone loves an everyman anthem.

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 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.

To every man of us, Tobruk was a symbol of British resistance and we were now going to finish with it for good.

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

We've seen the reality of Saddam's regime: his thugs prepared to kill their own people, the parading of prisoners of war and now the release of those pictures of executed British soldiers.

At the end of the day, flirting is a pretty universal language. Americans are more direct. British people are more indirect about everything

There'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.

The French and the British are such good enemies that they can't resist being friends.

...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.

I will not accept a new wave of fiscal retrenchment, of belt-tightening, without asking people at the top to make their contribution, to make an additional contribution. I don't think you can ask people on middle and low incomes, who, after all, are the vast majority of the British population, to bear the brunt of this adjustment.

I love London, I love the British people.