Top 1200 British Government Quotes & Sayings

The British press hate a winner who's British. They don't like any British man to have balls as big as a cow's like I have.

Well British pension funds have not been investing the savings of British people in British infrastructure.

Let's turn British inventions into British industries, British factories and British jobs. Let them make pounds for us, not dollars marks or yen for others.

The British government is a murder machine.

A lot of the time, the British press make me ashamed and embarrassed to be British. They give others the impression that the British are selfish, envious and bitter people, which is simply not true in my opinion. I think that British people in general are really nice and friendly.

I trust the integrity of the British government and the British soldiers.

Sinn Fein say, "The British government are buggers".

I work for the British people. I do not gather intelligence so the government can lie to the British people.

There is no good government but what is republican. That the only valuable part of the British constitution is so; for the true idea of a republic is "an empire of laws, and not of men." That, as a republic is the best of governments, so that particular arrangement of the powers of society, or in other words, that form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the law, is the best of republics.

The British government says that for Sinn Fein to be involved in talks the guns must be left at the door.

I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.

No British Government ever will and ever can risk the bones of a British grenadier.

Technically it was a victory for the British, who attacked the patriot fortifications but a Pyrrhic victory if ever there was: out of 2,200 British soldiers 1,034 were killed or wounded, including one in nine of all the officers the British lost in the whole war.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government.

For over 30 years, the IRA showed that the British government could not rule Ireland on its own terms.

No one will expect the British Government or the Government of India to give way to threats of violence, disorder and chaos; and, indeed, representatives of large sections of Indian opinion have expressly warned us that we must not do so.

I will walk on no grave of Ulster's honoured dead to do a deal with the IRA or the British government.

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race. They are few in number but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their own allegiance. They way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown. It is the wish of the British people and the duty of Her Majesty's Government to do everything that we can to uphold that right. That will be our hope and our endeavour, and, I believe, the resolve, of every Member of this House.

Armed struggle is a necessary and morally correct form of resistance in the Six Counties against a government whose presence is rejected by the vast majority of the Irish people There are those who tell us that the British government will not be moved by armed struggle. As has been said before, the history of Ireland and of British colonial involvement throughout the world tells us that they will not be moved by anything else.

It seems to me that the Conservatives neither recognise the scale of the living standards crisis facing British families nor offer credible answers as to how the British economy or British society can be better in the future.

One of the things I'm so determined to preserve and restore is the fact that you can be the kid who was born in Dinsdale and find yourself working for the British government in the U.K., to being prime minister.

The British government - any government - is potentially the worst [architectural] client in the world.

If the deaf are to hear, the sound has to be very loud. When we dropped the bomb, it was not our intention to kill anybody. We have bombed the British Government. The British must quit India and make her free.

The British Government and the Irish Government have accepted very clearly the Mitchell Report.

I know Im British. I havent spent much time in the U.K., but my parents are British, my family heritage is British, so if I wasnt British, what would I be? I am British.

The British government needs to bring its system in Ireland under control.

Gandhi was important for another reason as well: his country was suffering under the British Empire, and yet he was leading a very singular kind of resistance to it. At the time he was speaking about the violence in Europe, his followers were in jail as prisoners of the British government.

British people are surprised that I'm British! It's extraordinary, I get tweets every day from British people saying, 'I had no idea you were British.'

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.

If you sit down with British officers or British senior NCOs, they understand the sweep of history. They know the history of British forces not just in Afghanistan but the history of British successful counter-insurgencies - Northern Ireland, Malaysia.

If Aristotle, Livy, and Harrington knew what a republic was, the British constitution is much more like a republic than an empire. They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men. If this definition is just, the British constitution is nothing more or less than a republic, in which the king is first magistrate. This office being hereditary, and being possessed of such ample and splendid prerogatives, is no objection to the government's being a republic, as long as it is bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making, and a right to defend.

At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.

The British Government very naturally would like to see in India the form of democratic constitutions it knows best and thinks best, under which the Government of the country is entrusted to one or other political party in accordance with the turn of elections.

A certain secret jealousy of the British Minister is always lurking in the breast of every American Senator, if he is truly democratic; for democracy, rightly understood, is the government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators, and there is always a danger that the British Minister may not understand this political principle as he should.

Keynes was chief economic adviser to the British government and largely responsible for keeping the British economy afloat at a time when more than half of our gross national product, and all of our foreign exchange, was being spent on the war. I was lucky to be present at one of his rare appearances in Cambridge, when he gave a lecture with the title "Newton, the Man." Four years later he died of heart failure, precipitated by overwork and the hardships of crossing the Atlantic repeatedly in slow propeller-driven airplanes under wartime conditions.

'MaerskKendal' is a rarity with its British flag, the 'LONDON' home port painted on its bow, its two British chief officers, and its portrait of the queen in the mess room, apparently common courtesy on British ships, but a little alarming to me.

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.

By repealing the Child Poverty Act, which forced governments to take real action to tackle child poverty, this government brings a proud chapter of British history to an undignified end. In future the government will measure child poverty not by looking at whether they have any money, but by looking at their so-called 'life chances.'

I was determined that no British government should be brought down by the action of two tarts.

'Viceroy' is the first British film about the Raj and the transfer of power from Britain to India made by a British Indian director. It is a British film made from an Indian perspective.

Our ability to make a decision about the declaration is hampered by the British government being reluctant to give us the clarification which we require.

When government gets too big, freedom is lost. Government is supposed to be the servant. But when a government can tax the people with no limit or restraint on what the government can take, then the government has become the master.

I know I'm British. I haven't spent much time in the U.K., but my parents are British, my family heritage is British, so if I wasn't British, what would I be? I am British.

My family come from Cyprus. Both my father and my grandfather worked on the British bases there, and as the British government granted independence to Cyprus, they granted British passports to those who worked with them.

The Government which attacks its own innocent subjects has no claim to be called a civilised government. Bear in mind, such a government does not survive long. I declare that the blows struck at me will be the last nails in the coffin of the British rule in India.

British audiences are toughest on British films. So often, a British film is the last thing they want to see. If you please them, you really know you've made an impact.

Tax time approaches, and Americans are as always paying H & R Block billions to help them save some of their wealth from their ravenous government. Pitiful, in a way: it underlines the grim but unacknowledged fact that the government is their enemy and they have to hire protection from it. But don't we enjoy 'self-government'? Well, if we have it, I'd hardly say we enjoy it. True, we aren't being taxed by the monarch of Great Britain, but our American-born rulers claim far more of our wealth than the British monarchs ever did.

I think the British government's cutting back of arts funding is such a crime. I bet it will happen in Denmark soon, too.

We did not lack for religious leaders to urge us into "godly" war [...]. All of this was part of a well-financed propaganda campaign on the part of British agents. As usual, the government of the United States was being "run" by the British Secret Intelligence Service.

No Irish nationalist could support any treaty which institutionalizes British government claims to a part of Irish national territory. Indeed, the term - 'constitutional nationalism'- used by Mr.Mallon (SDLP) and his colleagues to describe their political philosophy is a contradiction in terms. The only constitutional nationalist in Ireland today is Sean McBride. He puts his nationalism within a framework of Irish constitutionality. Mr. Mallon, however, puts his within the framework of British constitutionality. Irish nationalism within British constitutionality is a contradiction in terms.

He made an enormous contribution to British politics in opposition and in government [on Robin Cook]

In England, all the English car companies were beginning to circle the drain in a series of well-deserved failures and bankruptcies, earned by making lousy products with very poor production at high prices. So, the government, back in the '70s, nationalized all the British car companies. The result was British Leyland, a name that perhaps doesn't resonate much with you.

Among the handful of British diplomats and military men aware of their government's secret policy in the Middle East-that the Arabs were being encouraged to fight and die on the strength of promises that had already been traded away-were many who regarded that policy as utterly shameful, an affront to British dignity.

I gave my parole once, and it has been shamefully violated by the British Government; I shall not give another to people on whom no faith can be reposed.

If the British government is prepared to say that the Unionists will not have a veto over British government policy and that guns, vetoes and injustices will all be left outside the door, then there is no good reason why talks cannot take place in an appropriate atmosphere.

It is not for us to give an assessment to what happened, but in our opinion the reputation of British science, the reputation of the British government, and the reputation of the title 'Sir' has sustained heavy damage.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.

We think of the revolution ending in Yorktown, Va. The fact of the matter is that the French defeated the British in a naval battle right in the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Because the British fleet was coming to rescue Cornwallis, the British general, Washington was able to surround Cornwallis.