British Political Quotes

#1. The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it's completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.

Nick Clegg

#2. Fear brings out the basest instincts," writes British political scientist Sue Goss, "and narrows our sense of belonging to self-preservation."16

Diana Butler Bass

#3. Some smart alecs of those days after World War I used to say: The French fought for liberty, the British fought to control the seas, but the Americans fought for souvenirs.

Harry Truman

#4. Really, we don't know what to make of it except that we're delighted about it. We have all these fans thirty years later and they're still around and will probably be around for a long time to come.

Russell Johnson

#5. Political elites look increasingly interchangeable: Blair, Brown, and Cameron have all tried to provide cover for the surrender of sovereignty to foreign investors with invocations of 'British' values, and, more opportunistically, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Pankaj Mishra

#6. The Declaration of Independence pronounced the irrevocable decree of political separation, between the United States and their people on the one part, and the British king, government, and nation on the other.

John Quincy Adams

#7. At the next election he'll offer the British public an alternative that provides weight and substance and seriousness in a political debate that is, frankly, increasingly obsessed with modishness and flim-flam.

Paddy Ashdown

#8. The British leadership has acknowledged that it only became possible to end the violence in North Ireland when it stopped thinking of the [Irish Republican Army] as "a terrorist organization" and began treating it as a political actor with genuine grievances that deserved to be addressed.

Richard A. Falk

#9. The world, whether we like it or not, will become more and more borderless.

John Key

#10. Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it.

Charles Krauthammer

#11. Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians.

Pankaj Mishra

#12. When you make a 3-D movie you actually have to plan the way the visuals look because there's a parallax issue, and there's an issue of editing; you can't edit very quickly in 3-D because the eye won't adjust fast enough for it.

Joe Dante

#13. And what the hell does that even mean? Why would you serve food for thoughgs, and what kind of food? If you serve spinach, do you get healthy thoughts? If it's ice cream and candy, it is fun thoughts? Why do we say stupid things?

J.D. Robb

#14. Life is just a lot better if you feel you're having 10 wins a day rather than a win every 10 years or so.

Chris Hadfield

#15. King Louis Philippe once said to me that he attributed the great success of the British nation in political life to their talking politics after dinner.

Benjamin Disraeli

#16. Well." Vivien smiled, swinging her legs. "At least when Iain starts yelling, his accent gets thicker, so you usually can't understand a word he's ... No, don't pull that one," she stopped me suddenly. "That one I do recognize. It's some sort of a daisy, or something.

Susanna Kearsley

#17. Early British pop was helped tremendously by the writing of Bob Dylan who had proved you could write about political and quite controversial subjects. Certainly what we did followed on from what was happening with the angry young men in the theatre.

Pete Townshend

#18. World War II had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership began to assume that they would prevail simply because of who they were. We were like the British at the turn of the 19th century.

Neil Sheehan

#19. The minds of youth are perpetually led to the history of Greece and Rime or to Great Britain; Boys are constantly repeating the declamations of Demosthenes and Cicero, or debates upon some political question in the British Parliament.

Noah Webster

#20. The British monarchy has the political and constitutional task of subtracting from the government and governors of Britain the papal and kingly airs that in America, because we have no such institution, unfortunately adhere to the president.

Mark Helprin

#21. Two famous happy warriors - Reagan and his political soulmate, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher - knew they were fighting their own ideological and external wars. But they did so with the sunny dispositions and positive outlooks of those who knew they were on the right side of history.

Monica Crowley

#22. I would be happy to accept asylum, political asylum, in India a nation I love. In return, I will bring Mayawati a range of the finest British footwear.

Julian Assange

#23. Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum; the reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution perhaps the first modern political institution.

Adam Gopnik

#24. If you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals.

Jonah Goldberg

#25. There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre.

Harold Pinter

#26. I think the United States and its British attack dog are not taken seriously anywhere in the world and can play no role in helping a political solution.

Tariq Ali

#27. British Statesman, parliamentary orator and political thinker, Edmund Burke once said, "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it." This is true to say the least.

Robert Paulson

#28. British appeasement of the Palestinian Arabs led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews [in the Holocaust] who might otherwise have found refuge in Palestine.

Sol Stern

#29. My wife and I work out together almost every day. It's just a great way to spend time together. We're going to run a marathon together later this year, and that's one more goal that we'll accomplish as husband and wife.

Bill Rancic

#30. When the British became Christian, Christianity in no way altered their political organisation.

Sabine Baring-Gould

#31. The British Government very naturally would like to see in India the form of democratic constitutions it knows best and thinks best, under which the Government of the country is entrusted to one or other political party in accordance with the turn of elections.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

#32. That these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

Richard Henry Lee

#33. More people died as a result of the tiny abortive Easter Uprising against British rule in Ireland (1916) than died as a result of political violence in Germany during the entire National Socialist revolution.

Adolf Hitler

#34. The right to privacy ... is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.

Harry A. Blackmun

#35. One of the things I miss most about the U.K. is political TV, and I have one of those little gadgets, which means I can download British programmes illegally - that's why it's a guilty pleasure.

Raza Jaffrey

#36. I'm highly political. I spend an awful lot of time in the U.S. trying to influence decision-makers. But I don't feel in tune with British politics.

Jane Goodall