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Scandal, it bears repeating, undermines monarchies, but rarely ends them. It may be true that, according to a recent editorial in the New York Times, the British monarchy now exists primarily 'for our amusement'. But as long as people find it amusing, and want to be amused by it, they will be happy to see it undermined but uneager to kill it off.
David Cannadine
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There is no good government but what is republican. That the only valuable part of the British constitution is so; for the true idea of a republic is "an empire of laws, and not of men." That, as a republic is the best of governments, so that particular arrangement of the powers of society, or in other words, that form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the law, is the best of republics.
John Adams
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When I write I have no loyalty except to historical truth as I see it and care no more about British achievements and mistakes than any other.
A. J. P. Taylor
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In Italy, for the same price as a typical British hamburger meal including sweet, a builder's labourer could eat like a king - rather better in fact, because pasta dishes gain from being kept simple.
Clive James
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Set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests; in short against the gates of earth and hell.
John Adams
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There are important arguments to be made about the relative merits of an hereditary or an elected head of state: but not at the level of the human frailties of particular monarchs or presidents. No one seriously contends that the American presidency should be abolished because Bill Clinton is a self-confessed adulterer. So why should the abolition of the British monarchy be contemplated because the same is true of Prince Charles?
David Cannadine
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Science is of no party. Under the government, whether of Whig or Tory, she has often had to complain of the difficulty of making herself heard in recommendation of her objects; but those objects once recognized by a British government, are taken up in a spirit and with a liberality which ensures success, if success be possible.
John Herschel
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The habit of a midwinter festivity had come by the dawn of history (and probably very long before) to seem a natural one to the British, and not one to be eradicated by changes of political or religious fashion.... It was general custom in pagan Europe to decorate spaces with greenery and flowers for festivals, attested wherever records have survived.
Ronald Hutton
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One of the marked superiorities the English enjoy over other peoples is their ability to imbue the foreigner with a crippling inferiority complex the moment he sets foot on British soil.
Pierre Daninos
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To look at and properly appreciate the British Museum is the work of a lifetime.
M. E. W. Sherwood
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What will not luxury taste? Earth, sea, and air, Are daily ransack'd for the bill of fare. Blood stuffed in skins is British Christians' food, And France robs marshes of the croaking brood.
John Gay
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In recent years, perhaps encouraged by competition from McDonald's, the British hamburger has become a credit to the nation. At the time of which I speak, it looked like a scorched beer-coaster or a tenderized disc brake.
Clive James
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There is that wish, in the name of democracy, to level down, because high cultural standards are despised and rejected, and even feared, in our Western Democracies. Don't let anyone else have what I've not got, or can't enjoy! - is the secret theory. A very large number of writers in the British and American popular press profess to be preaching democracy when in fact they are only trying to make envy respectable!
Ann Bridge
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Africans and people of African descent, especially those who have been poisoned by British imperialist education, needed a lesson. They have got it. Every succeeding day shows exactly the real motives which move imperialism in its contact with Africa, shows the incredible savagery and duplicity of European imperialism in its quest for markets and raw materials. Let the lesson sink in deep.
C. L. R. James
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America is replicated at every level of British life, from the taxi driver to the prime minister.
Timothy Garton Ash
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There are two ways to teach mathematics. One is to take real pains toward creating understanding visual aids, that sort of thing. The other is the old British system of teaching until you're blue in the face.
John von Neumann
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Students of the human mind have long noted its ability to mimic internally the positive notions and transformations of objects in the external world. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the British empiricist David Hume wrote that to "join incongruous shapes and appearances costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects" and that "this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience."
Roger Shepard
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Absolute monarchy,... is the easiest death, the true Euthanasia of the BRITISH constitution.
David Hume
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I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.
Freya Stark
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David Lloyd George had been to Germany, and been so dazzled by the Führer that he compared him to George Washington. Hitler was a 'born leader', declared the befuddled former British Prime Minister. He wished that Britain had 'a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today'. This from the hero of the First World War! The man who had led Britain to victory over the Kaiser!
Boris Johnson
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You know of our sympathetic interest in this country in Iran's desire to control its natural resources. From this point of view we were happy to see that the British Government has on its part accepted the principle of nationalization.
Harry S. Truman
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For the first time a British force had met, held and decisively defeated a major Japanese attack, and followed this up by driving the enemy out of the strongest possible natural positions.
William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim
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In wave mechanics there are no impenetrable barriers,. as the British physicist R.H. Fowler [also] put it after my lecture on that subject at the Royal Society of London.
George Gamow
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If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.
Ishmael Reed
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Slaveowners in America were torturing the Africans they enslaved for reading, but the British had discovered the hard way of truth of the maxim—
Elizabeth Nunez
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Yet would we die as some have done: Beating a way for the rising sun.
Arna Bontemps
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