British Quotes

I've had more than 12,000 emails from the United States. It's not easy in the United States to find out the email address of a British parliamentarian.

My parents are Italian and British. They live in Berkeley now - we all moved there four years ago.

Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores.

Ever since the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the Muslim world has been in slow decline relative to the west. With Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the creeping British annexation of Muslim India, that decline took on a malign aspect.

Gandhi has asked that the British Government should walk out of India and leave the Indian people to settle differences among themselves, even if it means chaos and confusion.

The British Constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.

You don't expect to get the letter saying, Her Majesty would like to appoint you Knight Commander of the British Empire! It was just a completely overwhelming and exciting day.

I've been proud to be national champion. I've really enjoyed it. I have very little opportunity to remind people that I'm British and it's a nice way of staying in touch. I'm going to defend it fiercely. I want to keep it.

The British have a remarkable talent for keeping calm, even when there is no crisis.

It the British System is the most gigantic system of slavery the world has yet seen, and therefore it is that freedom gradually disappears from every country over which England is enabled to obtain control.

I think it has something to do with being British. We don't take ourselves as seriously as some other countries do. I think a lot of people take themselves far too seriously; I find that a very tedious attitude.

You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.

There are no countries in the world less known by the British than those selfsame British Islands.

British politics is more nuanced. Part of the problem with New Labour is that they are a moving target.

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

But, you know, the Stones were my opening act in the Sixties. I loved those British guys, the way they just stood there and shook their hair.

If you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals.

Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.

It could be my British need for discipline that makes me admire the American appetite for freedom and passion.

I love London, I love the British people.

By adopting the 'free trade,' or British, system, we place ourselves side by side with the men who have ruined Ireland and India, and are now poisoning and enslaving the Chinese people.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

When I was younger, I was in love with everything about the British Isles, from British folklore to Celtic music. That was always where my passions were as a young girl, and so I studied folklore as a college student in England and Ireland.

Yes, I won the Bafta. I thought the British were very intelligent.

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.

I don't care if Margot is a Dame of the British Empire or older than myself. For me she represents eternal youth; there is an absolute musical quality in her beautiful body and phrasing. Because we are sincere and gifted, an intense abstract love is born between us every time we dance together.

As a kid in British Columbia, going back a long way, I learned to skate.

I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.

We have to ensure that our immigration system works in the interests of Britain, enabling us to make a realistic promise to our young school-leavers. It is part of our contract with the British people.

In this context the British and Irish governments will have to promote a new, imaginative and dynamic alternative in which both governments will share power in the north.