Britain Quotes

430 Sourced quotes

I hope history will judge us to have tackled the problem effectively and delivered a sustainable future for Britain's public services.

Great Britain is in a better state than at any former time to inflict a severe blow upon and to read a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten.

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston

Historians now debate whether Britain had a 'managed economy' by 1939, the very term—die gelenkte wirtschaft—adopted by German economists in the 1930s to describe the Nazi economy.

In Germany, it seems that the intellectual and aesthetic life are to be celebrated and are seen as part of a real and good education, whereas in Britain, traditionally – certainly since the Enlightenment – we've been afraid of anything intellectual, aesthetic, visual.

Oh, it sounds ridiculous, I know, in Britain in the twentieth century, but I learned in the war that civilization anywhere is a very thin crust.

Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.

By the time I stood for Parliament I was already carrying a walking stick, and the combination of my illness and my sense of withdrawal from a belief in a kind of Britain I would have preferred to see meant that I was no longer satisfied with such a (political) role: it wasn't creative enough, it didn't satisfy me. I simply didn't fit the bill in the end. Although I was a Labour candidate I didn't even vote in that election. I was probably the only candidate who didn't vote for his party.

The greatest reason for Japan's participation in the Triple Alliance lies in the fact that the three signatory powers, at this time of great change in the world situation, have the same position, the same interest, and entertain the same political views. China is not Japan's real enemy in the present incident. In reality Japan is fighting Britain and America. The first thing we are now required to do is to carry out our southward advance.

Toshio Shiratori

If democracy is destroyed in Britain it will be not the communists, Trotskyists or subversives but this House which threw it away. The rights that are entrusted to us are not for us to give away. Even if I agree with everything that is proposed, I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the people of Chesterfield. I just could not do it. It would be theft of public rights.

We still retain in Britain a deeper sense of class, a more obvious social stratification, and stronger class resentments, than any of the Scandinavian, Australasian, or North American countries.

Anthony Crosland

We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. "I claim India for Britain!" They're going "You can't claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!" "Do you have a flag …? "What? We don't need a bloody flag, this is our country, you bastards" "No flag, No Country, You can't have one! Those are the rules... that I just made up!... and I'm backing it up with this gun, that was lent from the National Rifle Association."

On this day I remember words that have stayed with me since my childhood and which matter a great deal to me today, my school motto: "I will try my outmost". This is my promise to all of the people of Britain and now let the work of change begin.

In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.

A ley line is what might be called a field of force, a trail of telluric energy. There are hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, all over Britain, and they've been around since the Stone Age.

Stephen R. Lawhead

The phrase "the Gnomes of Zurich" was coined by George Brown, the Deputy Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Britain is the only colony in the British Empire and it is up to us now to liberate ourselves.

You may take from me, Sir, the privileges and emoluments of place, but you cannot, and you shall not, take from me those habitual and warm regards for the prosperity of Great Britain which constitute the honour, the happiness, the pride of my life, and which, I trust, death alone can extinguish.

William Pitt the Younger

Britain today is suffering from galloping obsolescence.

The great paradox of Australian history is that what started out as a colony populated by people whom Britain had thrown out proved to be so loyal to the British Empire for so long. America had begun as a combination of tobacco plantation and Puritan utopia, a creation of economic and religious liberty, and ended up as a rebel republic. Australia started out as a jail, the very negation of liberty. Yet the more reliable colonists turned out to be not the Pilgrims but the prisoners.

The main difference between working in an NHS hospital in Britain and a prison is that prison is much safer.

Anthony Daniels

The Canadian government has a closer relation to economic activities than most governments. The trade in staples, which characterizes an economically weak country, to the highly industrialized areas of Europe and latterly the United States, and especially the fur trade, has been responsible for various peculiar tendencies in Canadian development. The maintenance of connections with Europe, at first with France and later with Great Britain has been a result. The diversity of institutions which has attended this relationship has made for greater elasticity in organization and far greater tolerance among her peoples.

Neither Britain, a province fertile in tyrants, nor the people of Ireland, knew Moses and the prophets.

I was on a promotional tour in Great Britain, and I stopped in Wales. I was there for three days and I ran out of books to read. I went to a local bookstore and asked the person working there to recommend some books in English. He suggested a collection by a poet who was from the area but warned me that the book wasn't selling very well. The poet was R. S. Thomas, and I bought everything they had. As I read him, I realized that he was the most important poet I could be reading at that point in my life.

There is no doubt that the treacherous attack has confirmed that Britain and America are acting on behalf of Israel and the Jews, paving the way for the Jews to divide the Muslim world once again, enslave it and loot the rest of its wealth. A great part of the force that carried out the attack came from certain gulf countries that have lost their sovereignty. Now infidels walk everywhere on the land where Muhammad was born and where the Koran was revealed to him. The situation is serious. The rulers have become powerless. Muslims should carry out their obligations, since the rulers of the region have accepted the invasion of their countries. These countries belong to Islam and not the rulers.

Osama bin Laden

Decades, if not centuries are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits. (for democracy) In Britain, the road to (democratic government) took seven centuries to traverse.

Jeane Kirkpatrick