British Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I was not a great match to be the little boy of the very British Basil Rathbone's character, I'm born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, and I had this southern accent. We were on these huge wide-open castle sets and they kept telling me how the microphones were 'way up there' and how I had to talk extra loud.

When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.

Anthony Trollope

A man may be a great statesman, and yet dislike his wife, and like somebody else's. A man may be a great hero, and yet he may have an unseemly passion, or an unpaid tailor. But the British public does not understand this.... It thinks, unhappily or happily as you may choose to consider, that genius should keep the whole ten commandments. Now, genius is conspicuous for breaking them.

The head of a ship however has not always an immediate relation to her name, at least in the British navy.

William Falconer

All men - whether they go by the name of Americans or Russians or Chinese or British or Malayans or Indians or Africans - have obligations to one another that transcend their obligations to their sovereign societies.

It is also absolutely correct that some British folk customs have descended directly from pagan rituals, such... the giving of presents and decoration of homes with greenery at midwinter.

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.

You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.

Paddy Chayefsky

In various talk th' instructive hours they past, Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last; One speaks the glory of the British queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen; A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes; At every word a reputation dies.

We have a hieroglyphical inscription in the British Museum as early as the reign of Sevechus of the eighth century before the Christian era, showing that the doctrine of Trinity in Unity already formed part of their religion and that... the three gods only made one person.

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

Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent.

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

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

Warriors! and where are warriors found, If not on martial Britain's ground? And who, when waked with note of fire, Love more than they the British lyre?

Formal education in British India was remarkable for its lack of connection with its Indian environment. Like the African persuaded to cover his nakedness with a Mother Hubbard, we wore mental Mother Hubbards, and they were often a sad fit. Our textbooks had been compiled by Englishmen for English children, of whom there were none in my school and few in any school in India.

Nayantara Sahgal

The defeat of the Americans in Canada and the advantages gained by the British arms in the Jerseys, and indeed for some months in every other quarter, gave to the royal cause an air of triumph.

Mercy Otis Warren

I consider myself a pretty rounded guy. I've done pretty elite things in business, sport and academics and all of a sudden I woke up one morning and I'm a 'big, black, British, gay guy'. That was frustrating at times

Why and how did our country fall from its brilliant antiquity to the degradation of pre-British days? The answer is that defeat of the oppressed castes at the hands of the Brahminic overlordship, of materialism by idealism, constituted the beginning of the fall of India's civilization and culture which in the end led to the loss of national independence.

E. M. S. Namboodiripad

I've had an incredible ringside seat to the last 50-odd years of rock 'n' roll. I think people will be very interested to know what the British Invasion was like, what Woodstock was like, what my friends are like, what trouble we got into, what heights we scaled. I think they'll be interested in all of it.

The [British] Empire had to die not because it didn't work, but because it worked too well. The quality of imperial rule was starting to present evidence against democracy herself.

It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939... from the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat.

Maurice Cowling

Sporting terms are pretty well understood wherever English is spoken … Well, then. The British soldier is a good sportsman … Germany elected to make this a finish fight with England … The fight must be to a finish – to a knock out.

David Lloyd George

The British motor industry is really owned by Nazis.

Jeremy Clarkson

Iron John, a short work of psychological, literary and anthropological speculation by the poet Robert Bly, dominated the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year and made, as we shall see, a significant impact on many aspects of American life. In England, it made no impression whatever. … We are British over in Britain, we are skeptical, ironical, et cetera, and are not given, as Americans are, to seeking expert advice on basic matters. Especially such matters as our manhood. In England, maleness itself has become an embarrassment: male consciousness, male pride, male rage, we don't want to hear about.