Quotes About Britain And Europe

#1. Much of my knowledge of locations in Britain and Europe comes not from school, but from away games or the sports pages, and hooliganism has given me both a taste for sociology and a degree of fieldwork experience.

Nick Hornby

#2. The choice is not normally between the north and south. It might be between Britain and Europe.

John Prescott

#3. I've always been a history lover. I've spent a lot of recreational time walking around historical castles and estates, in Britain and Europe, and so I know what the real thing looks like.

Natalie Dormer

#4. I have the money and they won't get their hands on it.

Margaret Thatcher

#5. Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West. The United States and Britain loved him. He was supported until the last minute.

Noam Chomsky

#6. 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

#7. We've got to get back on track to working with them. Because if I and my colleagues are going to continue to attract inward investment from overseas - you know particularly from the big Asian countries - they see Britain as a gateway to Europe. They don't want any doubts cast upon that.

Vince Cable

#8. If Britain becomes a member of the Community, it will be healthier for Britain, advantageous for Europe, and a gain for the whole world. I do not know of many economic or political problems in the world which will be easier to solve if Britain is outside rather than inside the Community.

James Callaghan

#9. Dover's cliffs call to mind the Roman invasion; the Battle of Britain; our proximity to, yet difference from, mainland Europe; and international trade and exploration, both fair and exploitative.

Julian Baggini

#10. For a time during the 1980s the Royal Family were not just the most influential family in Britain but probably in Europe and Prince Charles specifically was very much like a defacto Cabinet member and what he said actually had impact on public policy.

Andrew Morton

#11. If I'd been on the Remain side I would have tried to have seen the best in Europe and tried to explain that. Instead, what they've done is endlessly try and talk up what they see as the weaknesses of Britain and they aren't there. That's a total mistake.

Boris Johnson

#12. When Americans talks about Europeans, they are thinking Britain and the rest of Europe. When we [ Britains] talk about Europeans, we talk about everywhere else.

Steve Coogan

#13. In recent decades, Europe has retreated to the conduct of soft power. But besieged as it is on almost all frontiers by upheavals and migration, Europe, including Britain, can avoid turning into a victim of circumstance only by assuming a more active role.

Henry Kissinger

#14. David Cameron says he wants to keep Britain in the EU, but his tactics are so divisive that, if he gets what he wants it will be at the price of huge ill-will in Europe; or if he doesn't, it will be at the price of increased anti-EU sentiment in his own party and in British society.

John Bruton

#15. If I could, I'd take the food and art of Italy, for example, couple it with the quiet, understated personality of France and the orderliness of Germany, the cinematic and literary wit of Britain, and blend it into one utopian, and ultimately dystopian, probably, civilization.

Tsh Oxenreider

#16. If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea.

Winston Churchill

#17. I am not, never have been, and never will be a politician. But I want to tell you the United States has always been proud of having the support of the United Kingdom, of keeping Britain in Europe. We need Britain in Europe.

Evel Knievel

#18. The patriotism in Britain comes from us being a leader. On jobs, on tax havens, on workers' rights, on the environment. We can be leading Europe ... and it will be to the benefit of every British citizen.

Gordon Brown

#19. Britain must lead in Europe to intensify the fight against global terrorism and make our country safer.

Gordon Brown

#20. In Great Britain, an author published a book in which he claimed that Jesus Christ had children. Such statements don't trigger civil unrest and bloodshed in Europe. But write similar statements about Islam in Syria and you might see bloody uprisings.

Bashar Al-Assad

#21. I don't just want a better deal for Britain. I want a better deal for Europe too. So I speak as British prime minister with a positive vision for the future of the European Union. A future in which Britain wants, and should want, to play a committed and active part.

David Cameron

#22. The trouble with the Labour Party leadership and the trade union leadership, they're quite willing to applaud millions on the streets of the Philippines or in Eastern Europe, without understanding the need to also produce millions of people on the streets of Britain.

Arthur Scargill

#23. The United Kingdom and the European Union will remain indispensable partners of the United States even as they begin negotiating their ongoing relationship to ensure continued stability, security and prosperity for Europe, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the world.

Barack Obama

#24. It is not in the power of Britain or of Europe to conquer America, if she do not conquer herself by DELAY and TIMIDITY.

Thomas Paine

#25. 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

#26. On April 19 1943, the Bermuda conference gathered, with the participation of representatives from Britain and the United States, in order to discuss saving the Jews of Europe. In fact, the participants did everything in their power to avoid dealing with the problem.

Ariel Sharon

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. In Europe and Britain they seem to be much more accepting and embracing of older bands, whereas in America if you've been out for three years, you're old, and I think that attitude stinks.

John Bush

#31. In Europe and Japan, bourgeois life lingers on. In Britain and America it has become the stuff of theme parks. The middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford.

John N. Gray

#32. So in Europe, we had empires. Everyone had them - France and Spain and Britain and Turkey! The Ottoman Empire, full of furniture for some reason. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire, famous for fuck all! Yes, all they did was slowly collapse like a flan in a cupboard.

Eddie Izzard

#33. Unilateral disarmament by Britain is opposed to our country's best interests, could begin the unravelling of NATO and therefore jeopardise the stability of Europe.

James Callaghan

#34. Experts say that Britain and France have strong spy agencies; Germany's is competent but afraid to level with its public; the rest are relatively weak, and there is no Europe-wide spy agency.

David Ignatius

#35. In Britain, we've tended to replace the kind of architectural culture valued in much of Europe with an in-flight magazine lifestyle - all branding, marketing and 'accessibility', a word that usually means dumbing-down.

David Chipperfield

#36. When I am back in old Blighty, I am surrounded by the old and familiar concerns: New Labour, Europe, the Middle East and the rest. If you live in Britain, you will know what I mean - except you won't, because you will take it for granted that this is what the world is all about.

Martin Jacques

#37. It was one thing to contain the Soviet Union in Europe because Britain, France, and Germany were all willing to join in. But will Japan and other Asian countries be willing to join in the containment of China?

Samuel P. Huntington

#38. It is equally important that we now secure the right deal for Britain - and the next leader must have the skill and credibility to put together the right team to renegotiate our exit from and future relationship with Europe and explain the final terms to the British people.

Nicky Morgan

#39. Too often, the idea seemed to be that the cost of being part of Europe was being less like Britain. So after years of fighting to defend Europe against attacks from the Eurosceptic right, it would be fatal to retreat into the same arguments and begin the battle anew.

Douglas Alexander

#40. People feel that European institutions are remote and bureaucratic, run by shady cosmopolitan elites. Britain is not absolutely exceptional because if you look at the opinion polls, those sentiments are now quite widespread also in continental Europe.

Timothy Garton Ash

#41. Margaret Thatcher, growing up in a bombed and battered Britain, derived a distrust which has grown with the years not just of Germany but of all continental Europe.

Douglas Hurd

#42. I'll be explaining that Britain will be leaving the European Union, but I want that process to be as constructive as possible. And I hope the outcome can be as constructive as possible because of course while we're leaving the European Union, we mustn't be turning our backs on Europe.

David Cameron

#43. It is a terrible commentary on Christian civilization that the longest period of slave-raiding known to history was initiated by the action of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and Britain, after the Christian faith had for more than a thousand years been the established religion of Europe.

H.A.L. Fisher

#44. The real danger to Britain is a foreign policy that is isolationist in Europe and therefore weak in the rest of the world.

David Miliband

#45. I remember being in China and realising how irrelevant not even Britain is, but also Europe. We're just another remote country that hardly impinges on some places at all.

Clive Anderson

#46. Britain was still connected to Europe by glaciers, and it would have been possible to walk to France and not have to use the Eurostar.

Callum Evans

#47. I've always held the view that great states need strategic space. I mean, George Washington took his space from George III. Britain took it from just about everybody. Russia took all of Eastern Europe. Germany's taken it from everywhere they can, and China will want its space too.

Paul Keating