Top 84 Quotes About British History
#1. I knew a bit but we don't study a lot of British history at school in Australia. We have our own 50-year period to concentrate on.
Eric Bana
#2. I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills ... all apart from cooking.
Heston Blumenthal
#3. I went back in British history. Some 204 people died there after a mine collapsed in 1838. In 1866, 361 miners died in Britain. In an explosion in 1894, 290 people died there ... These are usual things.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
#4. In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just instruction but pleasure.
Simon Schama
#5. Oh, come on. You eye-hump him all through British History.
Cynthia Hand
#6. We can find common qualities and common values that have made Britain the country it is. Our belief in tolerance and liberty which shines through British history. Our commitment to fairness, fair play and civic duty.
Gordon Brown
#7. The long-established and noble rule of Law, one of the greatest products of the character and tradition of British history, has suffered a deadly blow. Blackmail has become respectable.
Robert Menzies
#8. No medieval monarch in the whole of British history ever had such power as every modern British Prime Minister has in his or her hands. Nor does any American President have power approaching this
Tony Benn
#9. There is a golden thread which runs through British history of the individual, standing firm against tyranny and then of the individual participating in his society
Gordon Brown
#10. The reality of life in Northern Ireland is that if you were Protestant, you learned British history, and if you were Catholic, you learned Irish history in school.
James Nesbitt
#11. The Windrush era is a very important part of British history as it helps us understand how and why we became the multicultural society we are today, and also helps us understand the history of race relations in this country.
Naomie Harris
#12. The motivations of kings in British history can generally be reduced to two: the quest for territory and the search for a male heir. No king was secure on his throne until he had a son, and no queen consort was ever really safe without a boy.
Kate Williams
#13. If you look back at British history, women being allowed to play sport in schools meant they had to change their clothing. They couldn't be running around in their long skirts and corsets, because you can't.
Clare Balding
#14. If you look back at history, the various Maharajas of the Indian empire actually helped support a whole British industry. The royalty in those days ordered exotic cars in huge numbers.
Mark Shand
#15. The United States may have retained more of the intellectual imprint of the British 18th century than Britain itself.
William Rees-Mogg
#16. What astounds me about the history of the British Navy is how cheaply we have policed the world for 300 years.
Ernest Bevin
#17. Of course the decision to commit British forces in Iraq was, for many MPs, a wrenching choice. However, our responsibility in the face of a growing ISIS threat is not to be paralysed by history, but to learn the correct lessons from it.
Douglas Alexander
#18. Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British.
Mohsin Hamid
#19. No one recorded what those marches were, though decades later there was an apocryphal and later-debunked story the one of the songs the British played was the on-the-nose The World Turned Upside Down.
Sarah Vowell
#20. To me, British fashion has a story. It has history, and I feel it's very much about our culture.
Rita Ora
#21. All the things that are part of your heritage make you British - that makes this country what it is. It's part of your history. And here, unlike America, it's still living history.
Bill Bryson
#22. When the British left, India was a multireligious, multiregional, multiethnic country, exploited, backward, and poor from colonialism.
Prem Kishore
#23. 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
#24. Teaching the history of the British Empire links in with that of the world: for better and for worse, the Empire made us what we are, forming our national identity. A country that does not understand its own history is unlikely to respect that of others.
Antony Beevor
#25. One of the consequences of the Iranian revolution has been an explosion of history. A country once known only from British consular reports and intrepid travelogues is now awash with historical documents, letters, diaries, grainy video, weblogs and secret police files of questionable authenticity.
James Buchan
#26. Vain, silly creature. Made for loving? Yes, but she'll have no lover, for I don't want her and she'll see no other.
Jean Rhys
#27. Until quite recently women's histories were largely overlooked but in the wake of feminism there has been increasing interest in retrieving them.
Alison Weir
#28. He sat there all through a history lesson about the Roman Empire, which
having lived in the Roman Empire, for the four hundred years during which it had included the British Isles
he found inaccurate and boring.
Susan Cooper
#29. Without history we are infants. Ask what binds the British Isles more closely to America than to Europe and only history gives a reply. Of all intellectual pursuits, history is the most supremely useful. That is why people crave it and need ever more of it.
Simon Jenkins
#30. In 1770, a British law was proposed to Parliament granting grounds for annulment if a bride used cosmetics prior to her wedding day.
- Marjorie Dorfman, The History of Make-up
Julie Klassen
#31. I'm somebody who is very, very proud to have been a part of the British film industry all my life and to have kind of been involved with a very important piece of British film history.
Daniel Radcliffe
#32. He (the British soldier) is generally beloved by two sorts of Companion, in whores and lice, for both these Vermin are great admirers of a Scarlet Coat.
Richard Holmes
#33. My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time ... Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.
Neville Chamberlain
#35. I loved history, particularly of the British, American and Old Testament kind.
Luke Ford
#36. It is a standing source of astonishment and amusement to visitors that the British Museum has so few British things in it: that it is a museum about the world as seen from Britain rather than a history focused on these islands.
Neil MacGregor
#37. 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
#38. The Royal Navy had not built its magnificent reputation over the centuries by avoiding battle.
Arthur Nicholson
#39. Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make 257 dollars on every (black slave) in a year, and spend only 12 or 13 dollars on his keep.
Howard Zinn
#40. The loss of India would mark and consummate the downfall of the British Empire. That great organism would pass at a stroke out of life into history.From such a catastrophe there could be no recovery.
Lord Randolph Churchill
#41. And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon have to say about the human record so far? He said, "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind." The same can be said about this morning's issue of The New York Times.
Kurt Vonnegut
#42. I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.
Richard Dawkins
#43. Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.
Mahatma Gandhi
#44. There is a history of gay people pretending to be straight. I want to balance the sides. I'm a straight person pretending to be gay. I've had a lot of people to imitate. It's easy when you're British; we're camp by nature, anyway.
Robbie Williams
#45. Because of the long, long history of British shipping, immigration, trade, empire, missionaries, you can have a better shot at telling a worldwide story in the British Museum's collection than any other. Britain has been more connected with the rest of the world than any other country, for longer.
Neil MacGregor
#46. The days are numbered for those bums over in England."
German Tank commander
Leo McKinstry
#47. I think the British learn their history through the prism of this gallery of grotesques known as the royals.
Harry Shearer
#48. Bill Clinton was one of the greatest presidents that we've seen. He was involved in the peace process in the very beginning, and he not only showed himself to be knowledgeable about Irish history and Irish-British relationships, but also he was very sympathetic to the idea of resolving conflict.
Martin McGuinness
#49. Redmond Howard, a politically aware witness to the Rising and a critic of the rebels, wrote in its aftermath: 'There never was, I believe, an Irish crime -- if crime it can be called -- which had not its roots in an English folly.
Tim Pat Coogan
#50. It was the greatest loss of life in the history of the British military, and many in the West began to portray the "savage" as European rather than as some native in the jungle.
David Grann
#51. I respect the British a lot - their history, their past, their culture. I think it's beautiful, what they have with the monarchy.
Jean-Marc Vallee
#52. You know your country has a checkered past when you find yourself sitting around pondering the humanitarian upside of sticking with the British Empire.
Sarah Vowell
#53. 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
#54. The central fact of North American history is that there were fifteen British Colonies before 1776. Thirteen rebelled and two did not.
June Callwood
#55. Dickens' London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place. Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer.
Judith Flanders
#56. It is the clash of two different worlds that makes British-ness unique - we have an aristocratic, noble history, but it is always contrasted with something rebellious.
Christopher Bailey
#57. They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.
Michael Lewis
#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. In Britain, these Jewish refugees were greeted with a mixture of grudging acceptance by some and open hostility by others.
Thomas Harding
#60. 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
#61. Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America's colonial period and British notions of poverty.
Nancy Isenberg
#62. Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time.
Stephen Richards
#63. With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt on to someone else.
Andrew Roberts
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Hitler learned his eugenics from the infamous "Baur-Fischer-Lenz" book that documented American and British eugenics.
A.E. Samaan
#67. We weather the vagaries of history, welcoming new rulers and bending knees to those in power, whoever they may be. We are a tool of the nation, an asset of the British Isles. Those who work within the Checquy can accomplish what no one else can, and so they are the secret arm of the kingdom.
Daniel O'Malley
#69. 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
#70. Among many, many others, the following things were definitely not interesting: the pupillary sphincter, mitosis, baroque architecture, jokes that have physics equations as punch lines, the British monarchy, Russian grammar, and the significant role that salt has played in human history.
John Green
#71. The Russian action in Chechnya could be likened to the British Army reducing Edinburgh to rubble and expelling a couple of million Scottish people in response to a unilateral declaration of independence by Scotland
Amjad M. Jaimoukha
#72. In Great Britain, woman was subordinate and confined. But at least she was also safe.
Linda Colley
#73. As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from progressive history, so the American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.
William E. Gladstone
#74. While we remember that we are contending against brothers and fellow subjects, we must also remember that we are contending in this crisis for the fate of the British Empire.
John Burgoyne
#75. The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.
Shashi Tharoor
#76. If the British Empire is fated to pass from life into history, we must hope it will not be by the slow process of dispersion and decay, but in some supreme exertion for freedom, for right and for truth.
Winston Churchill
#77. In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.
Graham Greene
#78. Then you are no longer afraid of death, Your Majesty?" the lady asked, awed at the queen's adventures. "No, I am no longer afraid of life.
Constance Jagodzinski
#79. 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
#80. Ending the slave trade was contrary to British economic interests. For all its limitations and hypocrisies - British slavery itself, of course, still continued to exist - I still think it was a great moment in human history.
Henry Louis Gates
#81. British garden history is best understood as a small incident in the histories of ideas, design and technology.
Tom Turner
#82. If you think about it, I made history. Not only was I the first black British woman to be nominated for an Oscar, I was the first black British person.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste
#83. 'What if?' history is a tricky game, but there is no doubt that the senior planners of D-Day - including Eisenhower and the British general Bernard Montgomery - believed that the Double Cross operation had played a pivotal role in the victory.
Ben Macintyre
#84. 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
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