British Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I had carefully read the Balfour Declaration. I had familiarized myself with the history of the question of a Jewish homeland and the position of the British and the Arabs. I was skeptical, as I read over the whole record up to date, about some of the views and attitudes assumed by the 'striped-pants boys' in the State Department.

Harry S. Truman

This was no doubt due in part to economic reasons, for Scotland before the era of modern industrial developments was a poor country and brains and brawn were among its few merchantable assets. Hence, on the one hand, the rewarding eminence attained by so many Scots beyond their own borders in the worlds of scholarship, commerce, and administration... and hence, on the other hand, the fame of the achievements of the Scots on the Continent as soldiers of fortune in the wars of Europe, a valorous reputation subsequently so well maintained by the Highland Regiments in the service of the British Crown.

Hugh Macmillan, Baron Macmillan

After his first Cabinet meeting as the British Prime Minister:

An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

Hassan and I looked at each other. Cracked up. The Hindi kid would soon learn what the British learned earlier in the century, and what the Russians would eventually learn by the late 1980's: that Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish customs but abhor rules. And so it was with kite fighting. The rules were simple: No rules. Fly your kite. Cut the opponents. Good luck.

Khaled Hosseini

Years later I would know what an important gift my parents had given me by seeing to it that I had my early education in the strict, traditional, British-style schools of Barbados. If I speak and write easily now, that early education is the main reason.

Shirley Chisholm

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.

A New Britain where the extraordinary talent of the British people is liberated from the forces of conservatism that so long have held them back, to create a model 21st century nation, based not on privilege, class or background, but on the equal worth of all.

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Let Blair and the British government take note and listen. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans. Our people are overjoyed. The land is ours. We are now the rulers and owners of Zimbabwe.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Lawrence Durrell

Of Tony Blair:

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

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.

Like or dislike her, the British Queen is harmless. Her role is purely ceremonial. Conversely, life and death are in the hands of the monarch who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.