British Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market.

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!

Rudyard Kipling

In this instance of the fire-arms, the Asiatic has been most improperly bracketed with the native. The British Indian does not need any such restrictions as are imposed by the Bill on the natives regarding the carrying of fire-arms. The prominent race can remain so by preventing the native from arming himself. Is there a slightest vestige of justification for so preventing the British Indian?

Let us... brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: "This was their finest hour."

Winston Churchill

The trade unions are a long-established and essential part of our national life. We take our stand by these pillars of our British society as it has gradually developed and evolved itself, of the right of individual labouring men to adjust their wages and conditions by collective bargaining, including the right to strike.

Winston Churchill

Cold is the heart, fair Greece! that looks on thee,
Nor feels as lovers o'er the dust they loved;
Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
By British hands.

We can safely make one prophecy: whatever the outcome of this war, the British Empire is at an end. It has been mortally wounded. The future of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis in their cursed island.

Through its imperialist system Britain brought about untold suffering of millions of people. And this is an historical fact. To be able to admit this would increase the respect, you know, which we have for British institutions.

That I want to destroy British imperialism is another matter, but I want to do so by converting those who are associated with it.

I considered the British as our natural enemies, and as the only nation on earth who wished us ill from the bottom of their souls. And I am satisfied that were our continent to be swallowed up by the ocean, Great Britain would be in a bonfire from one end to the other.

Thomas Jefferson

Your friend the British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

George Bernard Shaw

What senseless violence does is to prolong the lease of life of the British or foreign rule.

Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence, which is a noble thing.

Winston Churchill

I had the patriotic conviction that, given great leadership of the sort I heard from Winston Churchill in the radio broadcasts to which we listened, there was almost nothing that the British people could not do.

Margaret Thatcher

We weren't getting a fair deal on the budget and I wasn't going to have it. There's a great strand of equity and fairness in the British people - this is our characteristic. There's not a strand of equity and fairness in Europe - they're out to get as much as they can. That's one of those enormous differences. So I tackled it on that basis.

Margaret Thatcher

The Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns.

It is my duty to warn you that it will be used against you, cried the Inspector, with the magnificent fair play of the British criminal law.

Arthur Conan Doyle

I claim to have been a lifelong and wholly disinterested friend of the British people.

Make your minds perfectly clear that if ever you let loose upon us again a general strike, we will loose upon you – another "British Gazette."

Winston Churchill

The British people are good all through. You can test them as you would put a bucket into the sea and always find it salt.

Winston Churchill

We cannot evoke the true spirit of sacrifice and valour, so long as we are not free. I know the British Government will not be able to withhold freedom from us, when we have made enough self-sacrifice. We must, therefore, purge ourselves of hatred.

I even got a letter from a young woman in British Columbia that began as follows: 'Today I am eighteen. I am sitting at the window, looking out at the rain, and thinking how much I love you.'

It would be a blunder of the first magnitude for the British to be a party, in any way whatsoever, to the division of India.

We should lay aside every hindrance and endeavour by uniting the whole force and spirit of our people to raise again a great British nation standing up before all the world; for such a nation, rising in its ancient vigour, can even at this hour save civilization.

Winston Churchill

When the ANC says that they will target British companies. This shows what a typical terrorist organisation it is. I fought terrorism all my life and if more people fought it, and we were all more successful, we should not have it and I hope that everyone in this hall will think it is right to go on fighting terrorism. They will if they believe in democracy.

Margaret Thatcher