Top 100 British War Quotes
#1. I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .
George Packer
#2. Caroline's lips thinned, her face flushed. "My husband, sir, has more secrets in his tiny, insignificant mind than the entire British War Department has had on file since its inception." She huffed with pure, disgusted outrage, lowering her gaze to the floor to murmur, "I'll kill him.
Adele Ashworth
#3. The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
George Bernard Shaw
#4. The inhabitants of Coventry, for example, continued to imagine that their sufferings were due to the innate villainy of Adolf Hitler without a suspicion that a decision, splendid or otherwise, of the British War Cabinet, was the decisive factor in the case.
Martin Caidin
#5. I am leading a war against the British Empire. I'm not worried about what Democratic Party hacks say or do.
Kesha
#6. The war in Continental Europe appeared to be over. Germany had won. Europe was Fascist from Poland to Sicily and from Hungary to Portugal. There was no fighting anywhere. Rumors said the British government had discussed peace terms.
Ken Follett
#7. No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#8. She ... ran away so often, and with so many different people, that she became known to her family and friends as the Bolter ...
Nancy Mitford
#9. I would like to tell our American, British and Spanish friends that the Iraqi crisis is not a problem between the United States and France, but between those who want to move forward in the logic of war and the international community.
Dominique De Villepin
#10. Chav-bashing draws on a long, ignoble tradition of class hatred. But it cannot be understood without looking at more recent events. Above all, it is the bastard child of a very British class war.
Owen Jones
#11. I think the majority of the British people are still sanguine about the need for war.
John Major
#12. The essence of war is violence and moderation in war is imbecility.
-Admiral Jacky Fisher of the British Navy
Erik Larson
#13. It seems amazing that the Navy SEALs managed to get inside the compound and shoot Osama so efficiently. I can only imagine they were told that the mission was to rescue a bearded British hostage and he must be brought out alive.
Frankie Boyle
#14. Technically it was a victory for the British, who attacked the patriot fortifications but a Pyrrhic victory if ever there was: out of 2,200 British soldiers 1,034 were killed or wounded, including one in nine of all the officers the British lost in the whole war.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
#15. However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbours, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on her account.
Neville Chamberlain
#16. Author reports that a group of tortoises was given to the British by India's natives during the Seven Years War which ended in 1763. The last of those tortoises died in 2004 at the age of 255.
Patrick N. Allitt
#17. He kept his shirt-tail hanging out below the hem of his jacket as a white flag to motorists; over four thousand people had been killed in blackout accidents during the first few months of the war. It was safer to take an overseas posting with the British Expeditionary Force.
Christopher Fowler
#18. In March 1915, at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, the British fired more shells in a single 35-minute bombardment than they had during the whole Boer War.
Saul David
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. From infancy, I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.
Emmeline Pankhurst
#24. I don't want to hear of any of you men getting into any fights with the British. But if you do, you'd better not get whipped.
Curtis LeMay
#25. 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.
Tony Blair
#26. 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
#27. In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy.
Erich Fromm
#28. 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
#29. The British Red Cross asked me to help them spearhead a fundraising campaign for the victims of the war in Nicaragua. It was a turning point in my life. It began my commitment to justice and human rights issues.
Bianca Jagger
#30. We can safely make one prophecy: whatever the outcome of this war, the British Empire is at an end. It has been mortally wounded. The future of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis in their cursed island. (4th February 1945)
Adolf Hitler
#31. In case anyone in America had missed the utter helplessness of their government, 4,000 British troops captured and burned Washington DC. The Presidential mansion, where the decision for war had been taken, was one of the public buildings to be torched.
Andrew D. Lambert
#32. I am confident that in the end freedom and democracy will prevail over terror and tyranny. We will win this war on terror - and when we do Americans, the British, Iraqis, and people around the world will be more secure.
Doc Hastings
#33. 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
#34. I mean, when the British burned down the White House in the war of 1812, did we plant a "Tree of Remembrance" in the ashes, or did we get busy rebuilding?
Brian K. Vaughan
#35. The Royal Navy had not built its magnificent reputation over the centuries by avoiding battle.
Arthur Nicholson
#36. Fanny was upset when Crittenden criticized Florence Nightingale, the celebrated British nurse of the Crimean War, saying, he thought it a very unwomanly thing for a gentle lady to go into a hospital of wounded men.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#37. The author points out that novices to total war, and this Hitler and the British press have in common, overreact to daily events and lose sight of overall strategy.
William Manchester
#38. The war in Iraq is still going on. The British are helping. Mexico wants to help, but they need a ride over there.
Felipe Esparza
#39. The war against British rule must continue until freedom is achieved.
Martin McGuinness
#40. Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.
Sara Sheridan
#41. For an event that was wholly created in the poisonous psychological warfare kitchens of the Second World War, run by the ministries of propaganda in many countries, not just by the British or the Americans, but also the Russians and undoubtedly the world Jewish organizations.
Ernst Zundel
#42. The German air offensives against British cities in World Wars I and II not only failed to coerce the United Kingdom to surrender, but Germany also lost both wars.
John Mearsheimer
#43. Chuchill has renounced all British interests in Europe and those of his people who are not blind now realise that the pretext for this war was far removed from the cause of it, namely, the subservience of the so-called democratic politicians to their Jewish masters.
William Joyce
#44. Pitt and Burke were two of the most eloquent and respected members of Parliament, and taken together, by early 1775, they were warning the British ministry that it was headed toward a war that was unwise, unnecessary, and probably unwinnable.
Joseph J. Ellis
#45. 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
#46. We did not lack for religious leaders to urge us into "godly" war [ ... ]. All of this was part of a well-financed propaganda campaign on the part of British agents. As usual, the government of the United States was being "run" by the British Secret Intelligence Service.
Eustace Mullins
#47. That's what this war is all about, my friend. It's about which of us is the crazier.And clearly you British have an advantage.You were crazy beforehand.
Michael Morpurgo
#48. Set we forward; let
A Roman and a British ensign wave
Friendly together. So through Lud's town march,
And in the temple of the great Jupiter
Our peace we'll ratify, seal it with feasts.
Set on there! Never was a war did cease,
Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace.
William Shakespeare
#49. As British and French imperialism ebbed following the end of the Second World War, America became the main outside player in Arab affairs.
Stephen Kinzer
#50. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle [World War II], while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.
George Orwell
#51. The days are numbered for those bums over in England."
German Tank commander
Leo McKinstry
#52. This was the period when I used all the influence I had to get the British to abandon their export trade, and as much as possible convert all of their manufacturing facilities to the immediate needs of the war, including civilian, as well as military requirements.
W. Averell Harriman
#53. More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them.
Winston Churchill
#54. This is the beginning of the end (talking about the war) ... Everyone was saying ... But the British Prime Minister said, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Do you see the difference?
Anne Frank
#55. If we don't stop behaving like the British Empire, we will end up like the British Empire.
Pat Buchanan
#56. A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.
George Orwell
#57. The British government had become fearful of how its citizens would react to a wave of Jewish refugees from Germany, and had clamped down on immigration.
Thomas Harding
#58. Naval heroes are seldom immodest, but soldiers quite often are. It is said of one gallant general that publication of his book was delayed because the printer ran out of capital I's.
John Colville
#59. The leeway had been increased by the war period in which, by agreement, America concentrated on heavy bombers and transport aircraft while British effort was devoted to fighters and other combat types.
Pen And Sword Aviation
#60. The Annual Register for 1763 tabulated the casualty list for British sailors in the Seven Years' War with France. Out of 184,899 men raised or rounded up for the war, 133, 708 died from disease, primarily scurvy, while only 1,512 were killed in action.
Stephen R. Brown
#61. The great thing about the British SAS was that they viewed war the same way the American Special Operations community did. You didn't win by thinking inside the box and following someone else's rules. You turned the box upside down and made your own rules, no matter what the enemy threw at you.
Brad Thor
#62. Not only the priceless heritage of our fathers, of our seamen, of our Empire builders is being thrown away in a war that serves no British interests - but our alliance leader Stalin dreams of nothing but the destruction of that heritage of our fathers?
John Amery
#63. Before the Civil War, the Southern states were selling a lot of cotton to England and didn't seem to mind British occupation. By and large, the Revolutionary War wasn't at all great for business.
Henry Rollins
#64. I'm for fighting a war on terrorism, not a war in Southwest Asia that Alexander the Great couldn't win, the British Empire couldn't win, the Soviet Union couldn't win. That's stupid. It's a waste of resources; a waste of America's best and brightest.
Kurt Schrader
#65. The Soviet Knight is dying inside his armour. He is a secondary power like you British. He can start a war but cannot continue one and cannot win one. Believe me.
John Le Carre
#66. 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.
Carol Vorderman
#67. I built up a knowledge of 1960s and '70s British films because my dad used to work nights, and I'd sit up with my mum and watch films - 'How I Won the War' and the films of Richard Lester, Karel Reisz and John Schlesinger.
Nick Moran
#68. The drive to scale in almost every endeavor. The British went very large scale in ship building and a few other industries. Their steel plants were bigger and much more advanced than ours after the Civil War, but we had blown past them by the mid-80s.
Charles R. Morris
#69. In Britain, these Jewish refugees were greeted with a mixture of grudging acceptance by some and open hostility by others.
Thomas Harding
#70. The course of George St. Leger Grenfell's life was a continuing act of violence against the sanctities of Victorian life, and especially against its inmost essence, the family. And indeed, the large Grenfell family was an overpowering aggregation, even by the ample Victorian standard.
Stephen Z. Starr
#71. When the communists won the Chinese civil war in 1949, they accepted neither the semi-independence of Tibet nor the boundary lines drawn by British imperialism between Tibet and India.
Bruce Riedel
#72. We have to get tough with the Russians. They don't know how to behave. They are like bulls in a china shop. They are only 25 years old. We are over 100 and the British are centuries older. We have got to teach them how to behave.
Harry S. Truman
#73. To every man of us, Tobruk was a symbol of British resistance and we were now going to finish with it for good.
Erwin Rommel
#74. he merged his group with the small Imperial Fascist League to form the Union, which changed its name in 1936 to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. When the war began, its leaders were arrested and locked away.
Joshua Muravchik
#75. Churchill's 2,054 page book "Second World War" makes no mention of genocide or the murder of Jews. Coincidentally, Churchill was a strong proponent of eugenic legislation prior to the outbreak of WWII.
A.E. Samaan
#76. Current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth-century creation, prompted in part by 'post-World War I British and French imperialism and post-World War II creation of the state of Israel.
Rodney Stark
#77. In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that.
Stanley Hauerwas
#78. The British bombing of Caen beginning on D-Day in particular was stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime.
Antony Beevor
#79. It's ironic that early on in the war with Afghanistan, the Americans and the British were saying, 'We recognise there must be a Palestinian state,' then they rapidly forgot about it. I think history will show that that kind of amnesia will come back to haunt you.
Tom Paulin
#81. Had Howe pressed on the afternoon of the 27th, the British victory could have been total. Or had the wind turned earlier, and the British navy moved into the East River, the war and the chances of an independent United States of America could have been long delayed, or even ended there and then.
David McCullough
#82. It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.
Sara Sheridan
#83. We must assist the British in the war as if there were no White Paper and we must resist the White Paper as if there were no war.
David Ben-Gurion
#84. I've always felt, with 'The Iliad,' a real frustration that it's read wrong. That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes - it's become a cliched, British empire part of our culture.
Alice Oswald
#85. The British Army and Navy sang a rousing song called "Heart of Oak"; the rebels had writ one to counter it called "The Liberty Song." Both songs blustered of freedom; but both were sung to the same tune.
And we, to avoid offense, played the tune without words.
M T Anderson
#86. I've lived through Hitler, Stalin, the Cold War, the British Empire, segregation, apartheid, God knows what. The world will survive this, and with just a tiny bit of luck so will everyone you love.
Kamila Shamsie
#87. Bhagat Singh wanted to plan something new against the British. He stayed calm for some time and studied about the lives of the protestors of Russia, Italy and Ireland. These stories inspired him for war against the British.
Simran
#88. When the Revolutionary War ended in 1781, not everyone was celebrating. It is estimated that between 15 and 20 percent of the population back then were loyal to the British Crown and thus were not so thrilled when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown.
Rachel Martin
#89. For the first time a British force had met, held and decisively defeated a major Japanese attack, and followed this up by driving the enemy out of the strongest possible natural positions.
William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim
#90. The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#91. 'War and Peas' by Michael Foreman, one of the great British children's illustrators. His watercolours are so lovely you could almost eat them, just as members of the target audience have been trying to do for decades.
Tobias Hill
#92. I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.
Charles Stross
#93. Ferguson argued that British involvement in World War I was unnecessary, far too costly in lives and money for any advantage gained, and a Pyrrhic victory that in many ways contributed to the end of the Empire.
David Harsanyi
#94. We must endeavor to forget our former love for them [the British] and to hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.
Thomas Jefferson
#95. I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings.
Walter Dean Myers
#96. The Australian divisions and the New Zealanders had become what they were to remain for the rest of the war the spearhead of the British Army
John Terraine
#97. I ought to have seized the initiative in 1938 instead of allowing myself to be forced into war in 1939; for war was, in any case, unavoidable. However, you can hardly blame me if the British and the French accepted at Munich every demand I made of them! (14th February 1945)
Adolf Hitler
#98. The British soldiers are fellows who have all enlisted for drink. That is the plain fact - they have all enlisted for drink.
Duke Of Wellington
#99. It is now conceded that all idea of British intervention is at an end ... I want to hug the army of the Potomac. I want to get the whole army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small man and lick him.
Henry Adams
#100. When the citizens of Baltimore banded together to repel the British during the War of 1812, three in five were immigrants, and one in five was black - some were free, some slaves.
Martin O'Malley
