Top 1200 Britain Quotes & Sayings - Page 18
Explore popular Britain quotes.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
Britain has still got rather fewer astronomers than many other countries - the French and the Italians, for example. Why is that? I don't think those countries have better brains.
It was very hard breaking into the film industry in Britain. I had been to art school, and I was painting and doing commercials. And I did some of the very first rock videos.
I wrote about the life of a housing officer in Britain, in a pretty rough area of London. Maybe it was because I'm a big-mouth and an exhibitionist, and I'm slightly egotistical. All those things have to come together for a writer.
Britain is no longer totally a white place where people ride horses, wear long frocks, and drink tea. The national dish is no longer fish and chips, it's curry.
I was in Britain that year [1963] and some music publishing people in Denmark Street in London suggested me to the BBC. So I found myself in front of a British television show, which was a nice surprise.
For some of Britain's most powerful people, hunting and shooting are primordial rights, and any challenge to them is treated as illegitimate. They assert ownership not only of the land but also of the social relationships surrounding it.
Stop thinking that if Britain or America or Russia or the West or whatever becomes superior, then we'll beat them, and then we'll all have a rest and live happily ever after. That doesn't work.
I've found contemporary Britain difficult to write about because it seems to me to have lacked gravity or grandeur. This is some cultural problem which I don't really understand. It simply isn't the same in the United States.
Anyone, they say, is entitled to change his mind. Not about the defence of Britain, you're not. You either feel it in your heart, in your bones, in your gut, or you don't.
There's unrecognizable change happening in Britain. The life prospects and job prospects, particularly of working-class people, have been severely dented. Without anyone being asked.
Britain's railways don't need to be wholly nationalised and they don't need to be operated solely by private companies. Both of these myopias harm our ability to get the best deal for passengers.
We owe America something because they turned us into a touring band. But at least we feel confident about appearing in Britain again now. Hyde park was the first time over here for ages.
Because I don't belong entirely to Britain or the U.S. or India or Japan, I build my foundations in some way deeper than mere passports, and more in the light of where I'm going than of "where I come from."
South America was not really that open - you had to fit in, and I didn't fit in. I was different - my tastes, my point of view - were a bit weird, and I found in Britain a sense of calm, that I could just be.
When you see the kids on 'Britain's Got Talent' or 'The X Factor' who just want to be famous at all costs, you just go, 'God, these people just don't know what it is they're asking for.'
Halloween isn't the only time for ghosts and ghost stories. In Victorian Britain, spooky winter's tales were part of the Christmas season, often told after dinner, over port or coffee.
Experts say that Britain and France have strong spy agencies; Germany's is competent but afraid to level with its public; the rest are relatively weak, and there is no Europe-wide spy agency.
I'm absolutely delighted because I'm part of the process that has made Asians very much part of the mainstream fabric of Britain, whereas, when I first started, we were completely on the margin.
Britain is producing some of the worst films in the world. Our film industry is desperate to be part of America, and we just churn out flaccid imitations of bad films over there.
Aspects of life here civility, courtesy, coziness have always bound Britons to their country . . . They are part of the British myth, along with lovely countryside, dogs and horses, rose gardens, the Armada, the Battle of Britain.
I have another explanation [of Brexit]: In its 43 years of EU membership, Britain has never been able to decide whether it wants to fully or only partially belong to the EU.
Our workforce is very co-operative, very flexible, easy to work with and one of the big selling points. The idea that Britain is still back in the labour market of the '70s is utterly bizarre.
Even as our economy starts to pick up, and new jobs are created, there is a risk that young people in Britain won't get the chances they deserve because businesses will continue to look elsewhere.
History never repeats, but there are the obvious precedents that pessimists can reach for: Sarajevo, 1914; the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, 1938. But equally relevant might be the tragically meaningless guarantees Britain extended to Poland in 1939.
I was an expert skier who set his sights on going to the 1988 Olympics in Canada to represent Britain, and went from novice ramps to the 120-metre jump in five months. That's possible only with utter focus.
Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be too clever by half. The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.
Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy, were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts.
I have worked with this red all over the world - in Japan, California, France, Britain, Australia - a vein running round the earth. It has taught me about the flow, energy and life that connects one place with another.
I get nostalgic for British negativity. There is an inherent hope and positive drive to New Yorkers. When you go back to Britain, everybody is just running everything down. It's like whatever the opposite of a hug is.
There's another way we are getting behind business - by sorting out the banks. Taxpayers bailed you out. Now it's time for you to repay the favour and start lending to Britain's small businesses.
We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring such warnings.
There are those people who don't want change. Well there needs to be a coalition for change amongst the hard-working mainstream majority of the country to crack on and sort out Britain's problems.
The House of Peers, throughout the war, Did nothing in particular, And did it very well: Yet Britain set the world ablaze In good King George's glorious days!
While there is a great value in things that are old, it seems that the overwhelming challenge in Britain in the late 20th century is to make every effort to see value in the contemporary and in the future.
There is probably no finer prose writer alive in Britain now, no-one better at making a sentence, no-one better at descriptive writing, no-one who can get so close to the vividness of other peoples interior selves.
Sweden is still a very peaceful country to live in. I think that people in Britain have created this mythology about Sweden, that it's a perfect democratic society full of erotically charged girls.
My father came to Britain in search of a better life. My aunts, uncles and cousins fled here in search of safety as Cyprus's Greek and Turkish populations fell into open hostility.
In England we burnt redheads at the stake, because we thought they were witches. There are still young redheads in Britain getting ripped for having red hair. 'Oy, Ginger!'
It's a sad fact that a lot of those countries who haven't been involved in the war in Iraq have taken far more responsibility for rehoming people displaced by the war than Britain has done.
Indians invest more in Britain than in the rest of European Union combined. It is not because they want to save on interpretation costs, but because they find an environment that is welcoming and familiar.
In Britain we have a very powerful tabloid culture with celebrities on the front page crying with their make-up smeared and tears, and it's kind of what you'd expect from someone who likes to dress up that way.
Mrs Thatcher not only made history by becoming Britain's first female prime minister, she was the first woman to hold any comparable position in the western world.
Britain is blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous.
In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
I love Britain. It really worries me, the prospect of Ed Miliband propped up by Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP and what that could do to our country. It's absolutely right that we highlight to voters that potential risk.
The United States was founded on a revolution that abolished the monarchy, aristocracy, titles and primogeniture. Britain may be able in the future to become a more equal and open society while retaining all of these things. But this has yet to be proved.
No two countries are identical, and obviously, there's a difference between a referendum on a very complex relationship between Great Britain and the rest of Europe, and a presidential election in the United States.
Brexit is not, thankfully, a question of war. But, like Iraq, Brexit is an act of unprovoked self-harm and a massive strategic mistake that threatens Britain's credibility and authority in the world.
In Britain, class is a neurosis. You judge people from the moment they open their mouth and start speaking: what their accent represents in terms of where they were educated, what part of the country they're from, what kind of class background they have.
The epithets of parent and child have been long applied to Great Britain and her colonies, [but] we rarely see anything from your side of the water except the authoritative style of a master to a school-boy.
The fact is, as we leave the EU, Britain will be able to choose its own immigration system rather than having free movement with one part of the world and a managed system with elsewhere.
The emergence of a strong Muslim identity in Britain is, in part, a result of multicultural policies implemented since the 1980s, which have emphasized difference at the expense of shared national identity.
Growing up in Britain, Michael Caine has always been such an icon. Chatting with him, I know I came across as the biggest doofus. Literally, I was, like, bowing to him.
A fundamental reason why Britain was not torn apart by civil war after 1688 was that its inhabitants' aggression was channelled so regularly and so remorsely into war and imperial expansion abroad.
We still retain in Britain a deeper sense of class, a more obvious social stratification, and stronger class resentments, than any of the Scandinavian, Australasian, or North American countries.
Labour's Climate Change Act and our other reforms, including the Green Investment Bank, have been the foundation for the huge growth of Britain's green industries.
It is true that Britain and its institutions have survived past crises, but often this was because those in charge, at a certain point, snapped out of the stupor of latent optimism, recognised the dangers circling the nation and acted.
The web of influence which News Corporation spun in Britain, which effectively bent politicians, police and many others in public life to its will, amounted to a shadow state.
What a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Everything about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S.... Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it.
David Beckham is Britain's finest striker of a football not because of God-given talent but because he practises with a relentless application that the vast majority of less gifted players wouldn't contemplate.
