Old British Quotes

#1. I think the good old British democracy should keep scrutinising and pressing to get the truth out.

Clare Short

#2. Liberalism is a really old British tradition and it has a completely different attitude towards the individual and the relationship between the individual and the state than the collectivist response of Labour, and particularly Old Labour, does.

Nick Clegg

#3. We have nobility in Sweden, and it comes from the old British aristocracy.

Joel Kinnaman

#4. It's about time a 55-year-old British woman is the heroine of an action movie. I may have to write it.

Emma Thompson

#5. I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.

A.E. Van Vogt

#6. I spend a fair chunk of time in Los Angeles, and after about ten days of warmth and unbroken clear skies, you start to yearn for a bit of good old British gloom and rain!

Sean Bean

#7. Men have been growing more stupid for several thousand years; I myself shall waste no tears at his demise'- old British man in Earth Abides

George R. Stewart

#8. We have lost the good old British spirit. Instead we have American journalism and black-shirted buffoons making a cheap imitation of ice-cream sellers.

Oswald Mosley

#9. Hey, I saw this old British movie, all the people spoke so different, you could hardly understand them. But everyone here speaks American as good as you and me. What's with that?

Max Barry

#10. You are aware that I have some proficiency in the good old British sport of boxing.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#11. I don't think anyone takes the deaths in Midsomer as seriously as in say Wire In The Blood or Silent Witness. We're part of the old British 'whodunnit'. We're much more gentle and the deaths are sanitised, in a sense.

John Nettles

#12. Hollywood movies are designed for 15-year-old youths from North Dakota who, intellectually speaking, are on equal terms with a British zoo animal.

Jeremy Clarkson

#13. I once bought an old car back after I sold it because I missed it so much and I had forgotten that it never ran. It was a British racing car. You know, because I just wanted it back. I could only remember what was good about it.

Connie Chung

#14. As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don't require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing.

Andrew O'Hagan

#15. Like the pagans of old, unaffected by climate, the British were now dancing around a giant phallus. Unlike the pagans theirs was a sterile phallus, disarmed by condoms and pills - the first heathen sexual cult to be based around sterility rather than fertility.

Peter Hitchens

#16. In the summer of 1776, the average British soldier was 28 years old with seven years experience in the Army. The average American soldier was 20 and had known military life for only six months.

Joseph J. Ellis

#17. 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.

Rhys Darby

#18. The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions -- everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the miraculous past.

Stewart O'Nan

#19. As a child, I was attractive to paedophiles. I suppose being indecently assaulted when I was 13 years old should have warned me that there were some weird and dangerous men out there, but I had got over that episode in my life.

Stephen Richards

#20. The prospect of one day being hauled out of the canal by yet another old enemy was hard for France to swallow, even more so when British and French defence specialists discussed their exit strategy in case of an overwhelming Soviet attack, and the Brits proposed a massive evacuation via Dunkirk.

Stephen Clarke

#21. This is not our fight', the old man said. 'British or American, that is not the choice. You must choose your own side, find your road through the valley of darkness that will lead you to the river Jordan ... Look hard for your river Jordan, my child. You'll find it.

Laurie Halse Anderson

#22. Besides, Kristy sees me being nice to old ladies ? Huge turn-on, right ? Girls really like that kind of thing. Except Amber, who won't look at a guy twice unless he's got a British accent and a crazy-ass wife locked in the attic, or whatever, but she is clearly abnormal.

Hannah Johnson

#23. After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's primacy in the money markets.

Gore Vidal

#24. Using the passive voice is always very helpful. Mind you, a lot of that propaganda English emanates from here. The British establishment has always used the passive voice. It's been a weapon of discourse so those who committed terrible acts in the old empire could not be identified.

John Pilger

#25. 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

#26. I wouldn't even have braces on my teeth. I think they are horrible, and this idea that everyone should conform and be perfect is ridiculous. I like the fact I have good old-fashioned British teeth with a big gap. Who wants those gleaming white cosmetically enhanced American teeth?

Georgia May Jagger

#27. I'm not really into method acting - the way I was taught was the good old-fashioned British way of just doing your research and getting on with it.

Laura Donnelly

#28. I loved history, particularly of the British, American and Old Testament kind.

Luke Ford

#29. I don't think the Bonzo Dog could have evolved in America, nor could the old Nice: because of their musical discipline. This is one thing that British groups do have, a sort of discipline. Sometimes it can get a bit soulless, but on the whole I think it's preferable to the American alternative.

Jon Lord

#30. That high pitch scream emitted by Rose made me wince! Her ear bursting howls would stun me into silence as much as it silenced the eldest child in their home, eight-year-old Anna-Marie.

Stephen Richards

#31. His work was so great that it cannot be compassed in a few words. His death is one of the greatest losses ever to occur to British science.

{Describing Ernest Rutherford upon his death at age 66. Thomson, then 80 years old, was once his teacher.}

J.J. Thomson

#32. 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

#33. Godfrey's wife Charmian sat with her eyes closed, attempting to put her thoughts into alphabetical order which Godfrey had told her was better than no order at all, since she now had grasp of neither logic nor chronology.

Muriel Spark

#34. I am often struck by the anxious inferiority many well-educated British people display towards the U.S., particularly Londoners dazzled by New York, when many postcolonials are accustomed to regarding Britain's old imperial cosmopolis as the true capital of the western world.

Pankaj Mishra

#35. All British castles and old country homes are supposed to be haunted. It's in the lease.

Bob Hope

#36. The British regulatory system was revised, so that bigger profits were encouraged, which removed the option of big spending on programming. Quality just fell off a cliff, and all the old hands either left or were fired for being too expensive.

Lee Child

#37. I like the fact that I have good old-fashioned British teeth with a big gap.

Georgia Jagger

#38. 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.

Noel Clarke

#39. One of the characteristics of New Labour - and Miliband is irredeemably of that species - is that, in the guise of a new liberal language, it has adopted the age-old default mode of British foreign policy, namely military intervention.

Martin Jacques

#40. What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system.

Bertrand Russell

#41. I think the British have the distinction above all other nations of being able to put new wine into old bottles without bursting them.

Clement Attlee

#42. What did I want with prestige? The British Open paid the winner $600 in American money. A man would have to be two hundred years old at that rate to retire from golf.

Sam Snead

#43. It seems to me that Sotheby's is very much like the British monarchy: an old and apparently very venerable institution which is in fact very nimble on its feet, an institution invested with a great deal more self-interest than the public image would suggest.

Robert Lacey

#44. When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.

Doris Lessing

#45. The fact is that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business. It just doesn't work and you're going to hit a brick wall at some point.

Rupert Everett

#46. A few regular troops from old France, weakened by hunger and sickness, who, when fresh, were unable to withstand the British soldiers, are their general's chief dependence.

James Wolfe

#47. I think one of the great bits of The Muppet show is that it was set in a 19th century British theater and they live so nicely amongst that lovely old theater.

James Bobin

#48. Just as the British subject loves England despite her faults, so we must insist that all Germans who were part of the old Germany and helped shape her, recognize the greatness and worthiness of present-day Germany.

Gustav Stresemann