Top 100 Quotes About Britain
#1. Countries such as the U.S. and Britain have taken it upon themselves to decide for us in the developing world, even to interfere in our domestic affairs and to bring about what they call regime change.
Robert Mugabe
#3. Many old music hall fans were present at the funeral today of Fred 'Chuckles' Jenkins, Britain's oldest and unfunniest comedian. In tribute, the vicar read out one of Fred's jokes, and the congregation had two minutes silence.
Ronnie Barker
#4. When we sell a kilo of bean coffee in Uganda, we get one dollar per kilo. The same kilo, when it is processed [and sold in Britain], goes for $10, $11 or even more a kilo. That is the same situation [price disparity] that goes for all raw materials.
Yoweri Museveni
#5. Unemployment is due to the large import of goods from Britain and other countries. The Government haven't used the powers which they have for the benefit of the country.
Eamon De Valera
#6. England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequences: the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#7. The British Labour Party has always had a very strong "Atlanticist component," with an obsequiousness to American policies, and Blair represents this wing. He's clearly obsessed with Iraq. He has to be because the overwhelming majority of the people of Britain oppose a military action.
John Pilger
#8. Biscuits are sweet things in Britain, and apparently in America a biscuit is something like a scone, something savory that you'd have with soup.
Mini Grey
#9. Our party: New Labour. Our mission: new Britain. New Labour new Britain.
Tony Blair
#10. It was the Sephardi Jews who brought fish and chips to Britain, actually, believe it or not, from the Mediterranean world. Apart from actually eating and selling fish and chips, they were kind of debt enforcers.
Simon Schama
#11. By the time I was 18, I had absorbed punk rock from America, Britain, and the West Coast. All of it was so dark and weird and different and cool and hot and sexy and rebellious. It was a fist-in-the-air kind of rebellion that I wasn't getting from the '70s mainstream.
Michael Stipe
#12. Northern Ireland is part of Ireland, not Britain, as can clearly be seen from aerial photographs.
Jeremy Hardy
#13. Britain is an open and tolerant country, and I will fight with everything I have to keep it so.
George Osborne
#14. The Remain campaign ... I've never seen a more miserable offering. All they are saying is stay in and we'll do our best to make sure that Britain's Parliamentary independence isn't eroded faster than we can possibly imagine.
Boris Johnson
#15. How could Britain operate in India for 300 years and take so little back from it in terms of understanding?
Jane Wilson-Howarth
#16. Unfortunately, we don't have the option of marriage in our country. We could go to Britain or Spain or Argentina and do something symbolic, but that's not what I want. I want to have the rights of anybody else in my home country. I don't want to be a second-class citizen
Dick Cheney
#17. Both France and Britain are supportive of India's bid for a broad-based agreement on trade and investment with the European Union.
Salman Khurshid
#18. Britain has a lot of wind. It's our wind. We don't have to import it.
Edward Davey
#19. Leaning forward, he set out to conquer Miss Henrietta Barrett the same way he'd conquered women across Britain.
Simply by being himself.
Julia Quinn
#20. Apex predators are good for an environment in terms of biodiversity and trophic cascade - we have very few. But realistically, only a few areas could sustain free-roaming wolves in Britain, mostly in Scotland.
Sarah Hall
#21. Little Britain ... ever since it first came on ... I come here a lot, we have a lot of friends here, my wife used to work with a lot of Brits, so we were always keyed into the hot shows when they first came out. So, I fell in love with Little Britain.
Paul Feig
#22. The arts world prides itself on its diversity, inclusivity, open-mindedness and constant efforts to reach out to all. Yet at the very moment when Britain decides its future, hardly anyone in the arts seems to understand, let alone agree with, the opinion of at least half the population.
Richard Morrison
#23. I think the tradition of well-written history hasn't been squashed out of the academic world as much in Britain as it has in the United States.
Adam Hochschild
#24. American nuclear weapons would almost certainly start being removed from Britain within 12 months of a Labour government gaining power.
Neil Kinnock
#25. 'Britain's Royal Families' became my first published book, in 1989, from The Bodley Head, and the rest of the story is - dare I say it? - history!
Alison Weir
#26. But they also awarded a quite respectable 55th place to Enoch Powell, thereby demonstrating that, for certain sections of the population, being an unpleasant racist constitutes no bar to greatness.
Marc Morris
#27. Re-colonizing it and sort of reverse-colonizing it to the point that today the national dish of Great Britain is Chicken Tikka Masala.
Aasif Mandvi
#28. Tackling deprivation around the world is a moral imperative and firmly in Britain's national interest.
Andrew Mitchell
#29. The very notion of Great Britain's "greatness" is bound up with Empire,' the cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, once wrote: 'Euro-scepticism and littel Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood , and rotted English teeth.
Andrea Levy
#30. Britain has been good to the Jews, and the Jews have been good for Britain.
Ephraim Mirvis
#31. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.
Winston S. Churchill
#32. But let her remember, that it is in Britain alone, that laws are equally favourable to liberty and humanity; that it is in Britain the sacred rights of nature have received their most awful ratification.
Thomas Day
#33. The Dumnonii, whose city or fortress was at Exeter, were an important people. They occupied the whole of the peninsula from the River Parret to Land's End. East of the Tamar was Dyfnaint, the Deep Vales; west of it Corneu, the horn of Britain.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#34. Once their gaze turned back toward Europe, the puzzle dissolved: West Germany was the obvious equivalent and, indeed, a splendid candidate for the role of the global plan's European shock-absorbing pillar - certainly not Britain.
Yanis Varoufakis
#35. Germany's siege mentality and gnawing sense of encirclement (the need to 'storm out of the fortress' to prevent a Russian attack); Austria-Hungary's hatred of Serbia; Russia's deep fear of Germany; France's vengeful chauvinism; and Britain's ferocious Germanophobia.
Paul Ham
#36. In Britain, the press want to kill a show by revealing what's coming up and spoiling the pleasure.
Hugh Bonneville
#37. All - all right," she said, looking dubiously at the chair. "I - um, I need to change, though."
"I'll just wait in the hall." He straightened his spine and walked from the room, deciding he was the noblest, most chivalrous, and possibly the most stupid man in all Britain.
Julia Quinn
#38. Britain loves a bargain, but you don't get good, lasting architecture on the cheap.
David Chipperfield
#39. I don't get up in the morning and think my mission is to end Britain. I do get up in the morning and think that my mission is to end poverty.
Douglas Alexander
#40. The colleges of Edinburgh and Geneva as seminaries of science, are considered as the two eyes of Europe. While Great Britain and America give the preference to the former, all other countries give it to the latter.
Thomas Jefferson
#41. In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person wholly out of one class into another. Perfect translation from one language into another is impossible. Class is the British language.
William Golding
#42. 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
#43. Galvanised into action by the second trial, I was determined to change Britain's archaic sex laws.
Cynthia Payne
#44. We used to be so proud that our country offered far more economic opportunities than the feudal system in Great Britain, with its royal family, princesses and dukes. But social mobility in the UK is higher than in the US. Our social rift is as big as it was in the 1920s.
Robert Reich
#45. MRSA, which is a kind of super bug mutant, is killing 10,000 people a year in Britain.
George Galloway
#46. There is only one hope for mankind - and that is democratic socialism. There is only one party in Great Britain which can do it - and that is the Labour Party.
Aneurin Bevan
#47. Today, as a result of the policy of Macmillan's Government, Great Britain presents in the United Nations the face of Pecksniff and in Katanga the face of Gradgrind.
Conor Cruise O'Brien
#48. Britain gets the architecture it deserves. We don't value architecture, we don't take it seriously, we don't want to pay for it and the architect isn't trusted.
David Chipperfield
#49. Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#50. How large and varied is the educational bill of fare set before every young gentleman in Great Britain; and to judge by the mental stamina it affords him in most cases, what a waste of good food it is!
James Payn
#51. Under this Government, Britain will not return to the boom and bust of the past.
Gordon Brown
#52. Although I was always very happy in Britain, I never stopped thinking of America as home, in the fundamental sense of the term. It was where I came from, what I really understood, the base against which all else was measured.
Bill Bryson
#53. I rate Morrissey (Steven Patrick Morrissey) as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he's up there with Bryan Ferry.
David Bowie
#54. In Great Britain, governments often change their policies without changing their men. In France, they usually change their men without changing their policy.
Winston Churchill
#55. The first draft doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to be written!
Heather Robinson
#56. The extremes of opulence and of want are more remarkable, and more constantly obvious, in [Great Britain] than in any other place that I ever saw.
John Quincy Adams
#57. Britain is a very small country with a very large press.
David Hockney
#58. In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
Julian Barnes
#59. When Britain and the U.S. invaded Iraq, it was with the reasonable expectation that it was going to increase the threat of terror, as it has.
Noam Chomsky
#60. We have sectors of the economy, aerospace is a good example, where Britain's probably the second country in the world, the automobile sector, where we've done extraordinarily well, an enormous amount of investment over the last couple of years, life sciences is another.
Vince Cable
#61. Eternal is the fact that the human creature born in Ireland and brought up in its air is Irish. I have lived for twenty years in Ireland and for seventy-two in England; but the twenty came first and in Britain I am still a foreigner and shall die one.
George Bernard Shaw
#62. I love Britain, I lived there for nine years doing shows and things, but I don't know what a British sensibility is. I'd like to have someone tell me what an American sensibility is.
Frank Oz
#63. We really need to stop the imperialist tendencies of countries like the United States and Great Britain.
Cindy Sheehan
#64. Gas is almost a give-away in the U.S. at the moment. They've gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it ... Let's be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it.
James Lovelock
#65. C" is for colonies
Rightly we boast
that of all the great nations
Great Britain has most!
Mrs. Ernest Ames
#66. In Britain, doctors now use exercise as a first-line treatment for depression, but it's vastly underutilized in the United States,
John J. Ratey
#67. 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
#68. In the 21st century, I think it's fair to say, homosexuality is more accepted in Britain and it's wonderful that my generation has been able to grow up with that.
Dan Stevens
#69. We need to dig deep and give people a reason to be optimistic just as Obama is doing in America. Because in the same way that outcome of the U.S. elections will change the course of events there and around the world, so too do politics here in Britain.
Lucy Powell
#70. Quite naturally, the men who led in stirring up the revolt against Great Britain and in keeping the fighting temper of the Revolutionists at the proper heat were the boldest and most radical thinkers - men like Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson.
Charles A. Beard
#71. I have changed my Ministers but I have not changed my measures.Iamstill formoderation, and Iwill governby it.
Anne, Queen Of Great Britain
#72. I personally think that a couple of pounds a week - maybe rising to almost £3 a week - is a reasonable price for Britain to achieve a degree of energy security to reduce its total dependence on fossil fuels and to honour its commitments to cut green house gases.
Tim Yeo
#73. The people of Britain want a Home Secretary who will give them back their streets. They want a Home Secretary who will speak up for the victim, not the criminal.
William Hague
#74. Two of the first plays I saw after I arrived in Britain were 'King Lear' in Liverpool, and 'Antony and Cleopatra' at Stratford. One was produced with hardly a backdrop and the other with gigantic scene changes. I was impressed by what connected the two: the words and their life beyond the stage.
Romesh Gunesekera
#75. Britain's continuing membership of the Community would mean the end of Britain as a completely self-governing nation
Tony Benn
#76. The early Celts lived in an enormous region, stretching from modern Turkey through eastern and central Europe (including much of modern day Switzerland, Austria, Germany and northern Italy), and westwards and northwards into much of Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Britain and Ireland.
Sharon Paice MacLeod
#77. 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
#78. Britain's decision to send troops to the city did more to change the thinking of Bostonians than any step previously taken by London.
John Ferling
#79. Researchers from Britain's Keele University have found that swearing after an injury may help alleviate pain. Evidently, the pain that you feel is inversely proportional to the number of middle names you give Jesus.
Stephen Colbert
#80. Of the total surface area of Earth, Britain occupies just 0.0174069 per cent.
Bill Bryson
#81. What happens in Britain, what happens in the world, matters a lot to us in our core business.
Satya Nadella
#82. In Britain you're more used to challenging drama. In America, TV is just boring, and numbing, and bloody terrible.
Michael Imperioli
#83. There are two places that are hard to write about. A place like Britain, England in particular, which has been written about by everybody, and then the place that's never been written about.
Paul Theroux
#84. This is a Budget for Britain's future to secure fairness for each child and invest in every child
Gordon Brown
#85. The establishment in Britain is certainly against the arts and against education. If something doesn't make a profit, it's invalid, and art doesn't make a profit in that sense.
Peter Maxwell Davies
#86. If we go to the 1940s, Nazi Germany - look, we saw it in Britain. Neville Chamberlain told the British people: Accept the Nazis. Yes, they will dominate the continent of Europe, but that is not our problem. Let's appease them. Why? Because it can't be done. We cannot possibly stand against them.
Ted Cruz
#87. The US head of state grew up on food stamps. The British head of state grew up on the postage stamps.
Johann Hari
#88. A woman in Great Britain has died after being hit in the back of the head by a golf ball, on the first hole. Her husband was so distraught, he only played the front nine.
Jay Leno
#89. In the long run, the fall of one civilization is very much like the fall of another. Only the land remains.
Morgan Llywelyn
#90. I prefer the finesse of French humour. English humour is more scathing, more cruel, as illustrated by Monty Python and Little Britain.
Helen Mirren
#91. To all the revolutionaries fighting to throw off the yoke of tyranny around the world: look at British democracy. Is that what you want?
Andy Zaltzman
#92. I grew up in kind of the last generation of Canadians who thought things that were happening in Britain were more important, almost, than what was happening in Canada. And my mother was fervently of that opinion.
Robert MacNeil
#93. Corrupt judicial practices in Russia, America, China, Great Britain, and other countries only vary by a single degree: the cost of services.
Christopher Mart
#94. ... instead of trying to grapple with the implications of the story of empire, the British seem to have decided just to ignore it... the most corrosive part of this amnesia is a sense that because the nation is not what it was, it can never be anything again.
Jeremy Paxman
#95. I was the best manager in Britain because I was never devious or cheated anyone. I'd break my wife's legs if I played against her, but I'd never cheat her.
Bill Shankly
#96. It was 1989, and the word 'Muslim' wasn't even really used in Britain at the time; you were either black or Asian.
Leila Aboulela
#97. 'Viceroy' is the first British film about the Raj and the transfer of power from Britain to India made by a British Indian director. It is a British film made from an Indian perspective.
Gurinder Chadha
#98. It's hard to make a film in Britain. It's hard to raise money. The best stuff that is shot on film in Britain is usually shot on film for television.
James Nesbitt
#99. What royal families are very good at doing is surviving and reinventing themselves. That's true whether it's a constitutional monarchy in Britain or an authoritarian monarchy.
Robert Lacey
#100. A Britain which denounced the insanity of the nuclear strategy would be in a position to direct its influence at the United Nations and in the world at large, in a manner at present denied us
Michael Foot
