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British Quotes
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In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy.
Erich Fromm
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It was a very British and utterly unconvincing performance.
Agatha Christie
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The sight of wounded and whipped Zulus, mercilessly abandoned by their British persecutors, so appalled him that he turned full circle from his admiration for all things British to celebrating the indigenous and ethnic. He resuscitated the culture of the colonized and the fullness of Indian resistance against the British; he revived Indian handicrafts and made these into an economic weapon against the colonizer in his call for swadeshi — the use of one's own and the boycott of the oppressor's products, which deprive the people of their skills and their capital.
Nelson Mandela
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We thought being offered the M. B. E. [Member of the Order of the British Empire] was as funny as everybody else thought it was. Why? What for? We didn't believe it. It was a part we didn't want. We all met and agreed it was daft.
John Lennon
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See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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I ought to have seized the initiative in 1938 instead of allowing myself to be forced into war in 1939; for war was, in any case, unavoidable. However, you can hardly blame me if the British and the French accepted at Munich every demand I made of them!
Adolf Hitler
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Each nation has its own pet sins to which it is merciful, and also sins which it treats as most abhorrent. In America, we are peculiarly sensitive about big money contributions for which the donors expect any reward. In England, where in some ways the standard is higher than here, such contributions are accepted as a matter of course, nay, as one of the methods by which wealthy men obtain peerages. It would be well-nigh an impossibility for a man to secure a seat in the United States Senate by mere campaign contributions, in the way that seats in the British House of Lords have often been secured without any scandal being caused thereby.
Theodore Roosevelt
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Why lower oneself to taking pride from being American or British, when you can boast of being man!
Jules Verne
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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
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Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn.
Mahatma Gandhi
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The incident deepened my feeling for the Indian settlers. I discussed with them the advisability of making a test case, if it were found necessary to do so, after having seen the British Agent in the matter of these regulations.
Mahatma Gandhi
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It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind.
Winston Churchill
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That I want to destroy British imperialism is another matter, but I want to do so by converting those who are associated with it.
Mahatma Gandhi
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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
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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.'
Isaac Asimov
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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
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My father, more perceptive than many, wryly commented that by the time I was an adult there might not be an Indian Civil Service to enter. He turned out to be right. I had to settle for British politics instead.
Margaret Thatcher
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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
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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.
Mahatma Gandhi
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We are our own slaves, not of the British. This should be engraved on our minds. The whites cannot remain if we do not want them. If the idea is to drive them out with firearms, let every Indian consider what precious little profit Europe has found in these.
Mahatma Gandhi
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Yes, ruling by fooling, is a great British art with great Irish fools to practice on.
James Connolly
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Any kind of discourse which has a flavour of the British ruling class, so powerful is ancestral memory, must be strenuously avoided.
Anthony Burgess
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We're British! Bertie Ahern has nothing to do with Ulster. Bertie Ahern, keep your nose out of this wee province!
Paul Berry
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There are only two coherent British attitudes to Europe. One is to participate fully... and to endeavour to exercise as much influence and gain as much benefit as possible from the inside. The other is to recognise that Britain's history, national psychology and political culture may be such that we can never be other than a foot-dragging and constantly complaining member; and that it would be better, and certainly would produce less friction, to accept this and to move towards an orderly, and if possible, reasonably amicable withdrawal.
Roy Jenkins
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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
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