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.

There are no countries in the world less known by the British than those selfsame British Islands.

Military power tends to be a function of economic power, and the British Navy was the essential capability for establishing the imperial sway - which was attuned to furnish the raw materials for the British manufacturing ascendance. So they were mutually reinforcing.

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

It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.

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.

I like the best of the British press. The best of the British press is very good.

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.

There are 3 basic differences between we British and you Americans. One, we speak English, and you don't. Two, when we have a "World Championship", we invite teams from other nations. Three, when you meet the British head of State, you only have to get down on one knee.

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.

The British had an even stronger [then America] business interest in Nazi Germany. And Benito Mussolini was greatly admired.

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 Americans are identical to the British in all respects except, of course, language.

The British needlewoman follows blindly where the merchant leads.

I 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.

To destroy Christianity, we must first destroy the British Empire.

It is not yet too late for the Indian people to decide on rapid, ordered progress. I can assure them that the British people are as determined upon self-government for India as they are themselves.

I was in Britain that year [1963] and some music publishing people in Denmark Street in London suggested me to the BBC. So I found myself in front of a British television show, which was a nice surprise.

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.

If the British Empire is fated to pass from life into history, we must hope it will not be by the slow process of dispersion and decay, but in some supreme exertion for freedom, for right and for truth.

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.

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

What will not luxury taste? Earth, sea, and air, Are daily ransack'd for the bill of fare. Blood stuffed in skins is British Christians' food, And France robs marshes of the croaking brood.

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.

And this indifference is still very much present in modern South Africa. Just listen to Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer - a representative of the British elite in this country: Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation.

What senseless violence does is to prolong the lease of life of the British or foreign rule.

I think it's important that we have a new batch of British film-makers that aren't doing the same old stuff. And that includes me.

Like, Mission Of Burma to me always sounded almost like they were part of the British Arty New Wave. I kind of like that. I like not being able to tell the difference.

...Dean Mohamet, a Muslim landowner from Patna who had followed his British patron to Ireland. There he soon eloped with, and later marries, Jean Daly, from a leading Anglo-Irish family.... In 1807 Dean Mohamet moved to London where he opened the country's first Indian owned curry restaurant, Dean Mohamet's Hindoostanee Coffee House :...He finally decamped to Brighton where he opened what can only be described as Britain's first oriental massage parlour and became "Shampooing Surgeon to Kings George IV and William IV. "

The British could leave and half India wouldn't notice us leaving just as they didn't notice us arriving. All our reforms of administration might be reforms on the moon for all it has to do with them.

In a country like India, the British were only able to rule the country because it had completely co-opted the elite of the country, who did their work for them.

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 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.

I love English girls! I adore all their different accents. Who knows, I could find a British girlfriend on my travels!

My love of the British is equal to that of my own people.

I am leading a war against the British Empire. I'm not worried about what Democratic Party hacks say or do.

A British declaration be taken against Martinez for 'capturing and robbing us.

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.

It's like guerrilla warfare. If you reveal your location, all it does is allow your opponent to improve his artillery bearings. It's better to move quietly, with stealth, under cover of night. You've got two choices: You can wear cammies and shimmy along on your belly, or you can put on a red coat and stand up for everyone to see. It comes down to whether you want to be the British army in the Revolutionary War or the Viet Cong. History tells us which tactic was more effective.

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

I've always said that Adele has turned so many people on to British singers - whether female singers or just like music from this country in general.

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.

What is certainly true is that the American people, just like the German people, just like the British and people around the world, are seeing extraordinarily rapid change. The world is shrinking, the economies have become much more integrated and demographics are shifting.

The British public has always had an unerring taste for ungifted amateurs.

When the weather's good, there's no better place to be than the British countryside.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

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.