Top 1200 British Museum Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

Everyone the world over talks about British actors and British talent and I think that's because we were trained - until now - in theatre.

I think now you see a lot more British films from the perspective of, I guess what would be considered "new" British people - people of color, Asian people. I think that's what's happening now, whereas 20 years ago it couldn't happen because it was still predominantly, "British film is about middle-class white families and what they do."

The story of the British empire helps to explain the roots of most British people: white, black, and Asian.

My form is more on the lines of a Chinese porcelain-jar juggler. They learn it as a child. They learn, learn, learn, learn - but not with a porcelain jar. Then, when they're ready to perform, they're taken to a museum, and they're given a porcelain jar for a lifetime to use. When they're done, it's returned to the museum.

Be Briton still to Britain true, Among oursel's united; For never but by British hands Maun British wrangs be righted.

No British politician has ever been more despised by the British people than Margaret Thatcher.

British-built railways in India helped the British to make money and maintain order and, as a by-product, served to unite the country, ripe for independence.

Were you to read the British press today, you would learn that the British Empire never forgets its defeats.

The attack on the British embassy in Tehran came just days after the Iranian 'parliament' voted to expel the British ambassador, and therefore reeks of official complicity.

British fashion is self confident and fearless. It refuses to bow to commerce, thus generating a constant flow of new ideas whilst drawing in British heritage.

I was deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq with British Special Forces Units. I have great respect for the British military and the country as a whole, so I don't have anything negative to say about that.

If the colonists hadn't rejected British militarism and the massive financial burden of maintaining the British military, America wouldn't exist.

I've put live performance in a lot of spaces. Part of what I want to do is take over the takeover. Another way that someone put it is, you climb over the fence and you cut a hole in it, and let everyone else in. That's kind of what this is. The museum is a repository of great works, but there is certain work that no one ever calls great. This is an insistence on directing their attention to other stuff that's great, that never gets to be in a museum.

Here's a viewer's guide to BP media briefings. Whenever you hear someone with a British accent talking about this on behalf of British Petroleum they are not telling you the truth. That's the bottom-line.

The extraordinary exertions of the colonies, in cooperation with British measures, against the French, in the late war, were acknowledged by the British parliament to be more than adequate to their ability.

You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.

I strongly believe that we can create a poverty-free world, if we want to.... In that kind of world, [the] only place you can see poverty is in the museum. When school children will be on a tour of the poverty museum, they will be horrified to see the misery and indignity of human beings. They will blame their forefathers for tolerating this inhuman condition to continue in a massive way.

The trouble with the British is that they are not interested in ideas. If Jesus came back today and offered to speak for an hour on British television, they would say, "What! Another talking head?

We can safely make one prophecy: whatever the outcome of this war, the British Empire is at an end. It has been mortally wounded. The future of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis in their cursed island.

What I think about when I frequent the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan [Museum of Art], and I look at these artifacts that are taken out of context and how we're forced to view them as objects, as relics, as sculpture- static. But what's interesting is what it allows me to do in my head in terms of imagining what the possibilities are or imagining the role in which they played within a particular culture which I'm fascinated by.

After 'The Gamekeeper' I made one other film called 'Looks and Smiles,' but making British films was very difficult. There wasn't a tradition of British cinema.

You don't just find an empty museum and say, "I should do something here." I was looking for another kind of venue or exhibition format. I was trying to find a site where something could happen over a long period of time - something that could slowly transform itself and the place as it went. And I was also trying to stand out of the art-world system. Strangely enough, I stumbled on vacant museum.

Commanders and senior officers should die with troops. The honour of the British Empire and the British Army is at stake.

I'm the British home secretary. My job is to protect the British public.

I must fight unto the death the unholy attempt to impose British methods and British institutions on India.

Typically your work will end up in a museum [after] you're dead. And maybe that's the function of a museum. It's an archive of your work after you're dead.

Nova Scotia as a British colony also came into being as another result of these adventurous British expeditions to North America in the reign of James I.

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

Dubai was brilliant, they looked around the world. They saw Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, Chicago, Sydney, London all ran British common law. British common law is much better for commerce than is French common law or sharia law. So they took 110 acres of Dubai soil, put British common law with a British judge in charge, and they went from an empty piece of soil to the 16th most powerful financial center in [the] world in eight years.

Even under Poch, he had a different culture to the British. It wasn't that he didn't understand it. You know the British like to have a drink, it was just something that he couldn't get his head around. He wasn't willing to compromise on that, either.

There is something reassuring about British-made products and their inventiveness and ingenuity, their creative spirit and eccentricity and their British wit and charm.

I'm hoping that I make readers into museum goers and museum goers into readers.

But you know we couldn't compare what we do with what the British athletes did at the Olympics. We are very proud to be British and if we have done our bit to promote Britain in a historic year for the country that's brilliant.

If ailing British companies such as Rolls-Royce, Land Rover, British Airways and Cadbury can be turned around, there is still hope for the BBC.

We Scots have a fierce pride in the things we do that others can never appreciate. I am the British No. 1, but I would prefer to be the British No. 1 from Scotland every time.

I'm quite British in the sense of not expressing my emotions much. I save it for my songs. If you ask about a death in the family, or a lover, I will not be emotional. I'd probably answer with a smile. Because that's what we British blokes do.

I'm very proud to be British, and my brand is British.

I pride myself in being an aficionado of the British seaside. Throughout my career, I have visited and worked in many of the famous British resorts, from Great Yarmouth to Largs.

It turns out that understanding the British public is not rocket science. The British appreciate honesty and they also have a bonkers, off-the-wall sense of humour like me.

British-built railways in India helped the British to make money and maintain order; but, as a by-product, they served to unite the country, making it ripe for independence.

I'm from Norway, but I always felt like I'd grown up with British culture. We had everything from the BBC on our TV, so British drama seems very close to home.

I think Hellblazer is quite unique. In a comic world dominated by American characters (nothing wrong with that per se) Constantine was unashamedly British. A certain kind of miserablist British

In the 1960s, my first-generation immigrant parents were gifted the olive branch of a blue British passport when working for the British Army in Cyprus. It completely transformed the Paphitis story.

However British you may be, I am more British still.

The British Army should be a projectile to be fired by the British Navy.

I enter a whorehouse with the same interest as I do the British museum or the Metropolitan - in the same spirit of curiosity. Here are the works of man, here is an art of man, here is the eternal pursuit of gold and pleasure. I couldn't be more sincere. This doesn't mean that if I go to La Scala in Milan to hear Carmen I want to get up on the stage and participate. I do not. Neither do I always participate in a fine representative national whorehouse - but I must see it as a spectacle, an offering, a symptom of a nation.

When I was sixteen and knew nothing about art, I sat through almost six hours of Andy Warhol’s Empire. I did not understand it but thought: this is in a major museum, it must be important, what is going on here? I stayed until the museum closed. His Screen Test films are some of my favorite works made this century, but you need to give them back the time they took to be made.

The laws of England will protect the rights of British subjects, and give a remedy for a grievance committed by one British subject upon another, in whatever country that may be done.

Ineptitude and negligence directed British policies in India more than any cynical desire to divide and rule, but the British were not above exploiting rivalries.

I went to art school... but I worked at the Museum of Modern Art. I worked in fundraising at the information membership desk. I ended up, over a period of time, doubling the amount of membership revenue that came in through people entering the museum, so people would ask me to come and work for them.

I have no idea what a British sensibility or a British sense of humor is. I have no concept of what that is. I have no concept of what American sensibility is. I was born in Great Britain, but I was only there for six months, and we moved to Belgium, where I grew up. I love Britain, I lived there for nine years doing shows and things, but I don't know what a British sensibility is. I'd like to have someone tell me what an American sensibility is.

I think I've actually benefited from Australia being a kind of combination of both British and American culture. We kind of got the best of both British and American television and books, science fiction and fantasy, and so on. So I'm familiar with a lot of, for example, American books and television that a British author of my generation might not be.

Everyone the world over talks about British actors and British talent and I think thats because we were trained - until now - in theatre.

It is important that those that do come to settle in the U.K. gain a sense of British identity and share British values. We have always attracted the best and brightest.

British women's history was never confined to the British mainland; and contesting the narrative around enfranchisement shows us that rights were not bestowed by the state, but extracted from it by force.

I can pick out people in this city to follow. I can be in a show at the Museum of Modern Art, my space in the Museum of Modern Art is my mailbox, my mail is delivered there. Whenever I want mail, I have to go through this city to get my mail.

Many people worked with the inspiration to free the country by throwing the British out. After formal departure of the British this inspiration slackened. In fact there was no need to have this much inspiration. We should remember that in our pledge we have talked of the freedom of the country through defending religion and culture. There is no mention of departure of the British in that.

I think Americans still can't help but respond to the natural authority of this voice. Deep down they long to be told what to do by a British accent. That's why so many infomercials have British people.

Yeah, I definitely tend towards dry, sarcastic British humor. I actually aspire to be British - I'm pasty white as well.

I believe that a large part of the training in the regional theaters is in imitation of the British style of acting. The British orientation is textual; they start from the language and work toward the character.