Top 1200 Britain Quotes & Sayings - Page 19
Explore popular Britain quotes.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
In housing in the fifties in Britain and the sixties, we pulled down the terraces - destroyed whole communities and replaced them with tower blocks and we built walkways that became rat-runs for muggers. That was the fashionable opinion. But it was wrong.
Britain was once notorious as the 'dirty man of Europe' with polluted air, raw sewage pumped into the sea and protected sites being lost at a terrifying rate. E.U. laws and the threat of fines changed much of that.
As Dutch elm disease spread across Britain in the 1970s, the country fell into mourning. When the sentinel trees that framed our horizons were felled, their loss was a constant topic of sad and angry conversation.
The OBE, CBE and MBE are among the ways Britain honours its citizens for their contribution to national life. I wish we had agreed on a different form of words, but we haven't and the decision to change the system is above my pay grade.
How large and varied is the educational bill of fare set before every young gentleman in Great Britain; and to judge by the mental stamina it affords him in most cases, what a waste of good food it is!
In Britain, a 'block list' of harmful Web sites, used by all the major Internet Service Providers, is maintained by a private foundation with little transparency and no judicial or government oversight of the list.
Britain, however, has ended up specializing in the ones you don't see as much of: defense aerospace, making drive shafts for cars, pills and drugs, designing chips that go into 94 percent of the world's mobile phones.
Once upon a time - in the days of Margaret Thatcher and John Major - I would have rejoiced in a Conservative Party landslide in Britain. But now, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's victory fills me with fear and foreboding.
This is where I started life. This is where I went to uni. This is where the people I know are. This is my country, and when I put on my Great Britain vest, I'm proud, very proud, that it's my country.
I suppose I've always carried what is regarded as a bit of unnecessary baggage in Britain. I've always carried the charge that I am an intellectual in politics.
At the moment, in Britain we're facing such enormous cutbacks in education programs and music programs and art programs that you feel you are knocking your head against a brick wall.
It's funny going to America because you're starting again. You've just won a Brit Award, but nobody will care. You have to prove yourself, but it's good to do that stuff. You might be big in Britain, but you still have to work at it everywhere else.
If the United States of America or Britain is having elections, they don't ask for observers from Africa or from Asia. But when we have elections, they want observers.
The strategy we must follow is to defend the special relationship between Great Britain and Europe and, more specifically, between Europe and France.
Britain has united to send a strong message to anyone who seeks to peddle hate. Together we are stronger. Together we can beat hate.
This regard for the liberties of Europe, this care at one time for the protestant interest, this excessive love for the balance of power, is neither more nor less than a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain.
America, ladies and gentlemen, has done more for me financially than Britain ever has, or ever could have done.
If you watch cooking shows on cable, they have lots of British people. Because when you think good cooking, you immediately think Britain.
Both America and Britain understand that governments must be responsive to everyday working people, that governments must represent their own citizens.
I'll negotiate with toughness, and with great attention to detail to get the best possible deal for Britain. It's only when we are outside the European Union that we can at last bring those numbers [of migrants] under control in the way that the public want.
In the span of a human lifetime, and well within the collective memory, Britain went from a stable imperial power ruling an appreciable fraction of the Earth's surface to being a tumultuous patchwork which was at least superficially in decline.
We have an extreme rightwing government in Britain, although it's called the Labour government. That's confused a lot of people, but it's confusing them less and less.
There is much in the result of John Chilcot's seven-year inquiry into the decision-making that led to Britain's involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq that can be cited to excuse headlines that refer to his findings as 'scathing' and 'damning.'
I can make a joke pointing out that David Cameron told off Sri Lanka for human rights abuses committed with weapons Britain sold it - like Ronald McDonald calling you a fat bastard.
I made some flippant remark about not wanting my son to grow up with an American accent, and the next thing I knew, there were people in America suggesting I head back to Britain if I was unhappy at such a prospect.
They believed that Britain was in Ireland defending their own interests, therefore the Irish had the right to use violence to put them out. My argument was that that type of thinking was out of date.
I am very grateful to my colleagues for their support. There is a big job before us: to unite our party and the country, to negotiate the best possible deal as we leave the EU, and to make Britain work for everyone.
In the 19th century, we didn't much like the loud annexationist voices south of the border or American support for Sinn Fein adventurers who thought, by seizing the Canadian colonies, they could force Britain out of Ireland.
What I'm interested in is Britain projecting itself abroad, and through that its values and the things it holds dear. And I don't think you do that by refusing to talk to the world's second-largest economy [China]. In fact, that is positively counter-productive in my view.
The Dave Clark Five was basically a live band. During '63 we got the Gold Cup for being the best live band in Britain.
Britain can claim to lead the world in murder because it was a country that industrialized early. Other countries, going through the same process later, caught up and produced their own genres of detective fiction.
The English are loth to express their feelings, but in my stall in the choir I could feel the pent-up, passionate emotion, and also the fear of the congregation, not of death or wounds or material loss, but of defeat and the final ruin of Britain.
My head is in India, yet my body remains in Britain. I straddle the world like a colossus. Like a 5ft. 7in. colossus.
I'm not saying "job done" but I am actually pretty confident that Britain can be one of the biggest winners from these big global changes that are taking place and indeed become the richest of the major economies in the world in this coming generation.
Some members, like Britain and France, are ready, willing and able to take action in Libya or Mali. Others are uncomfortable with the use of military force. Let's welcome that diversity, instead of trying to snuff it out.
Nobody in Britain has voted for 4 million people to come here in the last 15 years, and for probably another 3 million to come between now and 2020.
In a much larger sense, the problem of Sabah is directly influenced by the duplicity of imperial Britain. For whatever devious reason, the dismantling of the British empire created divisions and violence due to ethnic and religious differences.
The monarchy is so extraordinarily useful. When Britain wins a battle she shouts, God save the Queen; when she loses, she votes down the prime minister.
I have found far greater enthusiasm for science in America than here in Britain. There is more enthusiasm for everything in America.
I am the monarch of the sea,
The Ruler of the Queen's Navee,
Whose praise Great Britain loudly chants
And we are his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!
I prefer the finesse of French humour. English humour is more scathing, more cruel, as illustrated by Monty Python and Little Britain.
If the people in Britain knew the nature and disposition of the New England people as well as we do they would not find so many friends in England as I suppose they do.
When Captain America died, Americans heard it in an American way: through the media. When Captain Britain died, the British felt it in their chests.
The colleges of Edinburgh and Geneva as seminaries of science, are considered as the two eyes of Europe. While Great Britain and America give the preference to the former, all other countries give it to the latter.
Britain has a long and proud record of welcoming migrants. They have made many positive contributions to our economy. But the impact of uncontrolled immigration from the E.U. has placed new pressures on our country.
I understand that in the UK there have already been 10,000 complaints from viewers about these remarks, which people see, rightly, as offensive. I want Britain to be seen as a country of fairness and tolerance. Anything detracting from this I condemn.
We in Britain stopped evolving gastronomically with the advent of the pie. Everything beyond that seemed like a brave, frightening new world. We knew the French were up to something across the Channel, but we didn't want anything to do with it.
The characters in 'Be Near Me' come from a genuine place, a Britain that is more than one country and more than one ideal.
I was pretty much grown-up by the time I attended school in Britain - or as grown-up as I'll ever get.
The Spanish Civil War, Britain was not involved in it. Going back a bit, there was the naval blockade to stop the slave trade in the 19th century; that was morally just. Shame they didn't bother to abolish slavery at the same time.
We undervalue food in this country, yet Britain has beautiful food and beautiful growing conditions. It is astonishing the range we can grow.
My girlfriend's dad runs the Prostate Centre on Wimpole St. in London, and he's chairman of Prostate U.K., which I think is the second-largest prostate cancer charity in Britain.
At the start of the 21st century, Britain is caught in a confusing riptide of anxiety. Of course racism still exists, but things have improved to a point where many ethnic minority Britons do not experience it as a regular feature in their lives.
I was interested in the ripples of feminism passing through Britain and Ireland in the mid-Seventies - how the reverberations of the feminist political movement were being felt in suburban households. So many novels end with a marriage.
People ask why God allows suffering. You could just as well ask the Minister of Transport why he allows accidents on Britain's roads.
It may be easily shown, and is of no small significance, that the two great ideas of which the Anglo-Saxon is the exponent are having a fuller development in the United States than in Great Britain.
Thatcherism, as an ideology, addresses the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. It invites us to think about politics in images. It is addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community, to the social imaginary.
I hope that's what the taxpayers of Great Britain expect, is expect us to, when we make investments in countries, that they work. And they don't work if a nation doesn't invest in its people.
I think Brits probably feel that Americans are more like us than vice-versa, if that makes sense. Because we get everything American over here in Britain, but yet there are things which are staunchly English that you guys don't have.
I am opposed to abortion on demand, and I am opposed to the 1967 Act in Britain being transferred to the north.
