British Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

How a peaceful, uncrowded place with ample wherewithal stays poor is hard to explain. How a conflict-ridden, grossly over-populated place with no resources whatsoever gets rich is simple. The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.

It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness. They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in Watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.

It is essential to rear a generation at the very top of society that has all the qualities needed to lead and give the people the inspiration and the drive to make it succeed. In short, the elite.. Every society tries to produce this type. The British have special schools for them: the gifted and talented are sent to Eton and Harrow.

On being told that he was seven minutes late for the handover of Dublin Castle from the British to the Irish Free State:

We've been waiting 700 years, you can have the seven minutes.

Michael Collins

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

The British government has urged its citizens to abstain from alcohol at least two days a week. Or to make it easier to remember, whenever they brush their teeth.

Of Tony Blair:

We want him to be the last British Prime Minister with jurisdiction in Ireland.

Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.

Lawrence Durrell

In 'A Room of One's Own', Virginia Woolf satirically describes her perplexity at the bulging card catalog of the British Museum: why, she asks, are there so many books written by men about women but none by women about men? The answer to her question is that from the beginning of time men have been struggling with the threat of woman's dominance.

He was the outlier of a new type: the first twentieth-century personality to be famous for being famous. If he toured Africa with 17 pieces of matched luggage, or got hit by a car crossing Fifth Avenue in New York, he wrote about it. His life became a forerunner of reality TV; in today's terms, he did everything to seek celebrity but release a sex tape. A great question of Churchill biography, therefore, is how this Paris Hilton of British politics became the second coming of King Arthur.

Iraq has never been a coherent nation-state; arguably, it wouldn't exist if the British Empire hadn't installed the Kingdom of Iraq in 1932. Its three biggest communities—Sunni Arabs, Shi'a Arabs and Kurds¬—have proven themselves incapable of living together in peace. The country will probably never be both democratic and stable within its current borders. Splitting Iraq into its three constituent parts would be better for the people who live there. It would be better for us, too, insofar as this separation would prevent the kind of unstable anarchy that breeds both Sunni and Shia militias, including ISIS.

All these riches, then, of her theology the Church has acquired, one might almost say, like the British Empire, in a fit of absence of mind. She was so busy scrapping with the heretics that she wasn't conscious of saying anything she hadn't always said; and yet, when she had time to sit down and look about her, she found it took ten minutes to sing the Credo instead of three.

It was a typically British birth... I was three at the time. They had a strike in the maternity ward... I came out in sympathy.

I set off in yoga seventy years ago when ridicule, rejection, and outright condemnation were the lot of a seeker through yoga even in its native land of India. Indeed If I had become a sadhu, a mendicant holy man, wandering the great trunk roads of British India, begging bowl in hand, I would have met with less derision and won more respect. At one time I was asked to become a sannyasin and renounce the world, but I declined. I wanted to live as an ordinary householder with all the trials and tribulations of life and to take my yoga practice r to average people who share my life with me the common life of work, marriage and children. I was blessed with all three…

B. K. S. Iyengar

It is the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism, but one should not suggest that the whole of British industry consists of practices of this kind.

That more than 90 per cent of the Indian population should continue to be illiterate even after 175 years of British rule in this country is an intolerable situation which calls for immediate action.

Syama Prasad Mookerjee

No one believes more firmly than we do that the safety and welfare of India depend on the permanence of British administration.

George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston

We're British! Bertie Ahern has nothing to do with Ulster. Bertie Ahern, keep your nose out of this wee province!

Yes, ruling by fooling, is a great British art with great Irish fools to practice on.

Cyriack, whose Grandsire on the Royal Bench
Of British Themis, with no mean applause
Pronounced and in his volumes taught our Laws,
Which others at their Bar so often wrench

Any kind of discourse which has a flavour of the British ruling class, so powerful is ancestral memory, must be strenuously avoided.

Anthony Burgess

The French manner of hunting is gentlemanlike; ours is only for bumpkins and bodies. The poor beasts here are pursued and run downby much greater beasts than themselves; and the true British fox-hunter is most undoubtedly a species appropriated and peculiar to this country, which no other part of the globe produces.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

After the conquest of the South Pole by Amundsen who, by a narrow margin of days only, was in advance of the British Expedition under Scott, there remained but one great main object of Antarctic journeying - the crossing of the South Polar continent from sea to sea

Ernest Shackleton

Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent.

The physical universe never has any choice — it must inevitably move along a single road to a predestined end. Contributions to a British Association Discussion on the Evolution of the Universe