Top 69 Britain War Quotes
#1. Well, you know ... I grew up in postwar Britain, when you were lucky to get anything to eat. People in America have absolutely no conception of how austere England was after the war. While you were all sort of eating butter and eggs, we were eating rabbit. That's what there was in the butcher shop.
Tim Curry
#2. I didn't know a thing about Oxford and had never been to Britain. My father suggested it because in 1939 he had been about to take up a place at Wadham College, but the war broke out, and he joined the Army instead.
Tariq Ali
#3. Oh, when shall Britain, conscious of her claim, Stand emulous of Greek and Roman fame? In living medals see her wars enroll'd, And vanquished realms supply recording gold?
Alexander Pope
#4. If now we were livingin the Revolutionary War and George Washington he being arrested through Britain. For sure he, they would consider him enemy combatant. But American, they consider him as hero.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
#5. He also had his proof that bureaucracy made small problems into big problems. India convinced Dad that Britain, which he called socialist England, had delayed the Allied victory in World War II by an entire year.
Claire Conner
#6. In Britain, these Jewish refugees were greeted with a mixture of grudging acceptance by some and open hostility by others.
Thomas Harding
#7. All but 50 of these officers and 200 of these sailors will return home to occupied France, rather than stay in Britain to fight the Germans. Their idea was to get out of the war
Charles Kaiser
#8. The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars Englandhe should have said Britain, of coursealways wins one battlethe last.
Winston Churchill
#9. The Greek Civil War led to three decades of illegality for the Left, which had to operate under front organisations. The Cold War entrenched in power - backed by the US and Britain - a monarchist, authoritarian right for whom political violence was customary.
Anonymous
#10. The old men were still running the country. The politicians who had caused millions of deaths were now celebrating, as if they had done something wonderful.
Ken Follett
#11. No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.
Neil Kinnock
#12. A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.
George Orwell
#13. In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.
Isoroku Yamamoto
#14. They could take the money from building enough nukes to kill all the Russians in the world and give it to libraries. What good does an independent nuclear deterrent do Britain, compared to the good of libraries?
Jo Walton
#15. And what if Britain lost? There would be a financial crisis, unemployment, and destitution. Working-class men would take up Ethel's father's cry and say that they had never been allowed to vote for the war. The people's rage against their rulers would be boundless.
Ken Follett
#16. The Spanish Civil War, Britain was not involved in it. Going back a bit, there was the naval blockade to stop the slave trade in the 19th century; that was morally just. Shame they didn't bother to abolish slavery at the same time.
Jeremy Corbyn
#17. When I warned them [the French] that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken. Some chicken! Some neck!
Winston Churchill
#18. Mr. Churchill is proud of Britain's stand alone, after France had fallen and before America entered the War.
Eamon De Valera
#19. Despite an unqualified understanding that U.S. national security was inextricably bound up with Britain's survival, F.D.R. knew that his reelection in part rested on the hope that he would keep the country out of war.
Robert Dallek
#20. The bond between the United States and Britain has always been strong. It has survived through war and peace, periods of prosperity and economic hardship.
Louis Susman
#21. Just imagine going to war over Danzig - such a world catastrophe, just to prevent Germany from getting a piece of territory that belonged to her; because Britain was afraid of Germany getting too strong.
Joachim Von Ribbentrop
#22. [The official prosecutors] ... were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.
Sir Laurens Van Der Post
#23. I would sum up the German character best by saying that they are the best of losers and the worst of winners.
Edmund Ironside
#25. Even now I am haunted by the touching look of the young, bright, anxious eyes as we passed along the rows of sufferers. There, all around us, lying maimed and battered and dying, was the flower of Britain's youth.
Wade Davis
#26. The year 1915 was one of meager results, the advantages remaining on the side of the Central Powers, with this understanding, however: The Allies were growing stronger because Great Britain was making rapid progress in marshaling her resources for war.
Kelly Miller
#27. From Britain's point of view the 1939 war had been a liberal war which had been entered into in a condition of moral indignation without the resources to fight it, that it had been providential good fortune which had placed the burden of fighting on the Russians and the Americans.
Maurice Cowling
#28. It would have been very much better for the world if Britain had remained neutral and the Germans had won a quick victory. We should not have had either the Nazis or the Communists if that had happened.
Bertrand Russell
#29. Will Great Britain have an unwilling India dragged into war or a willing ally co-operating with her in the prosecution of a defence of true democracy?
Mahatma Gandhi
#30. More Irishmen died fighting for Britain in World War I than died fighting against her in all of Ireland's bids for independence combined.
David Frum
#31. I consider the war of America against Britain as the country's war, the public's war, or the war of the people in their own behalf, for the security of their natural rights, and the protection of their own property.
Thomas Paine
#32. Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy, were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts.
Gordon Sinclair
#33. If you were born in Britain after World War II, you see a continuous atmosphere of decline, moral and economic and political.
Stephen Bayley
#34. A fundamental reason why Britain was not torn apart by civil war after 1688 was that its inhabitants' aggression was channelled so regularly and so remorsely into war and imperial expansion abroad.
Linda Colley
#35. At the end of the war American and Soviet troops massed throughout most of the European peninsula, with Americans also in Britain and the British in Europe. The peninsula was occupied, shattered and exhausted, no longer the arbiter of its own fate.
George Friedman
#36. In Greece, British troops entered after the Nazis had withdrawn. They imposed a corrupt regime that evoked renewed resistance, and Britain, in its postwar decline, was unable to maintain control. In 1947, the United States moved in, supporting a murderous war that resulted in about 160,000 deaths.
Noam Chomsky
#37. Let me give you an idea of Fifties Britain. The war had ended ten years before, and most people had returned to their gardens and allotments hoping life would revert to how it was before the hostilities.
Mary Quant
#38. The first modern propaganda agency was the British Ministry of Information a century ago, which secretly defined its task as to direct the thought of most of the world - primarily progressive American intellectuals, who had to be mobilized to come to the aid of Britain during World War I.
Noam Chomsky
#39. As a student, I had stayed with Winston Churchill; later, I had lunched with Harold Macmillan - in fact, had met most of the post-war prime ministers of Great Britain from Douglas-Home to Tony Blair.
Nigel Hamilton
#40. We are really doing our very best. There are no doubt many mistakes and shortcomings. A lot of things are done none too well. Some things that ought to be done have not yet been done ... [But Britain's effort has] justly commanded the wonder and admiration of every friendly nation in the world.
Winston Churchill
#41. It's a sad fact that a lot of those countries who haven't been involved in the war in Iraq have taken far more responsibility for rehoming people displaced by the war than Britain has done.
Romola Garai
#42. In three weeks Britain will have her neck wrung like a chicken.
Maxime Weygand
#43. The first war zone was declared by Great Britain. She gave us and the world notice of it on the 4th day of November, 1914. The zone became effective Nov. 5, 1914.
George William Norris
#44. Grossly to oversimplify the contributions made by the three leading members of the Grand Alliance in the Second World War, if Britain had provided the time and Russia the blood necessary to defeat the Axis, it was America that produced the weapons.
Andrew Roberts
#45. This arch-liar today shows that Britain never was in a position to wage war alone. This gabbler, this drunkard Churchill. And then his accomplice in the White House, this mad fool.
Adolf Hitler
#46. We should demonstrate that in war, under Churchill and Lloyd George, and in peace, Britain always was, already is, and can continue to be a leader.
Gordon Brown
#47. Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.
Noam Chomsky
#48. Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.
J.B. Priestley
#49. We, Britain and Germany, can neither of us be happy about our handling of the Iraq war.
Douglas Hurd
#50. The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britain's belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.
James Buchan
#51. The United States stands with our friends in Britain as they recover from today's shock of terrorism. These barbaric acts strengthen our resolve and remind us all of the danger of complacency during our continued war on terror.
Mark Foley
#52. During the late war I had an infallible rule for deciding what Great Britain would do on every occasion. It was, to consider what they ought to do, and to take the reverse of that as what they would assuredly do, and I can say with truth that I was never deceived.
Thomas Jefferson
#53. I was a product of the times, the war, the occupation, the reoccupation, my 4 years in Britain, admiring but at the same time questioning whether they are able to do a better job than we can.
Lee Kuan Yew
#54. Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.
Sara Sheridan
#55. It is so important for European countries, post-Second World War, to prove that they can be successful multiethnic and multiracial democracies. I think we in Britain have had great success in avoiding the hatreds and prejudices of the past.
David Cameron
#56. The marshalling of those resources in order to obtain the maximum war effort for Australia, and a maximum degree of help and cooperation for Great Britain and the sister Dominions, is the primary objective of the new Department.
Harold Edward Holt
#57. The discovery, that at no time did this man (Hitler) pose or intend a real threat to Britain or the Empire.
David Irving
#58. Pointing out the possible, and expensive, entanglements that could come with widespread commercial enterprise, the author calculates the Great Britain was at war half the time between 1689 and 1783.
John Ferling
#59. It is worth recalling that Britain, over several centuries, waged a war against homosexuality - in the name of religion, social order, decency, etc. - that certainly equalled, and in its scale probably outstripped, anything that happens in Arab countries today.
Brian Whitaker
#60. Fox hunting, there's big fox hunting thing, there's arguments in Britain about fox hunting. And they go around. They obviously hunt foxes because the foxes, they attack chickens. And posh people have an alliance with chickens just like in the First World War.
Eddie Izzard
#61. After a war of about 40 years, undertaken by the most stupid [Claudius], maintained by the most dissolute [Nero], and terminated by the most timid [Domitian] of all the emperors, the far greater part of the island [of Britain] submitted to the Roman yoke.
Edward Gibbon
#62. The Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the future of Christian civilization.
Winston Churchill
#63. Israel was born under the British mandate. We learned from the British what democracy means, and how it behaves in a time of danger, war and terror. We thank Britain for introducing freedom and respect of human rights both in normal and demanding circumstances.
Shimon Peres
#64. Almost everywhere else in Europe, the more military the state, the stronger the king - except in Britain. Here it was parliament, not the monarchy, who signed the cheques. The longer the war went on, the stronger parliament became, as the purse on which it sat grew bigger and bigger.
Simon Schama
#65. In death as in life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war [WW II], and I defy the powers of darkness which they represent. I am proud to die for my ideals, and I am sorry for the sons of Britain who have died without knowing why.
William Joyce
#66. Britain in 1939 and 1940 really thought they were going to lose the war. It looked like they were going to lose. There was bombing every day, and people were literally starving.
Graham Moore
#67. The first thing I learned was the 'St Louis Blues' when I was eight. Both my grandmothers, my mother and uncle played the piano. This was post-war Britain, and they played boogie woogie and blues, which was the underground music of the time.
Jools Holland
#68. Britain needs a real push. It needs nationalism. The sort of spirit that comes during a war. It needs people really to want to see the UK sitting again, maybe not as a colonial power, but as an economic power.
Ratan Tata
#69. Britain wouldn't have won the war without its eccentric geniuses.
Sara Sheridan
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