Top 575 British Quotes

I’m British – ostensibly British – but I don’t know where I really belong, you know?

I never had a black teacher or lecturer, I never once met a black British person who held any sort of professional or managerial role.

The reason that most British actors are better than most American actors in the end is that they don’t make any money. At the very end of their lives, they get into a space movie and they make a lot of money, but until that happens, basically, they don’t have bank accounts. They live from day to day.

I’m highly political. I spend an awful lot of time in the U.S. trying to influence decision-makers. But I don’t feel in tune with British politics.

I’m getting to enjoy the mentality of the British, the sarcasm, the dry humour. There are so many more ways of articulating yourself than in German.

Within two months I made the grand slam: covers of ‘American Vogue’, ‘Italian Vogue’, ‘British Vogue’, and ‘French Vogue’.

I come from a political family. My father was a freedom fighter. He was a prominent leader of the locality and member of the Congress party. He spent 10 years in British prisons. In the evening, in our living room, the only subject we used to discuss was politics. So politics was not unfamiliar to me.

I can always tell if a band has a British rhythm section due to the gritty production.

This was the period when I used all the influence I had to get the British to abandon their export trade, and as much as possible convert all of their manufacturing facilities to the immediate needs of the war, including civilian, as well as military requirements.

I’ve had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press.

No. I am not a royalist. Not at all. I am definitely a republican in the British sense of the word. I just don’t see the use of the monarchy though I’m fierce patriot. I’m proud proud proud of being English, but I think the monarchy symbolizes a lot of what was wrong with the country.

The whole of government needs to contribute to the shared goal of restructuring the British economy. But that means taking on the myth that the Treasury either knows best or can run it all. It just doesn’t.

My influences were Peter Sellers and the great British character actors.

When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt.

Banks operate like a man who either wears his trousers round his chest, stifling breathing, as now, or round his ankles, exposing his assets. We want their trousers tied round their middle: steady lending growth; particularly to productive British business, especially small scale enterprise.

British media supported Hillary. No problem with that. No interference. Nothing. French media supported Hillary. No problem with that. Some Russian media supported Trump: ‘Oh my God!’

Most British people are keen to remain in a European free trade zone; and most EU states are keen to keep us there, because we buy from them more than we sell to them to the tune of £40 million per day.

I am not a British isolationist. I don’t just want a better deal for Britain. I want a better deal for Europe too.

I got a tooth bust by somebody who decided they didn’t like me and I thought the moustache hid a scar on my lip. It’s true that people were told facial hair was not appreciated by the British public, but I just decided to keep the moustache.

When I read that the British army had landed thirty-two thousand troops – and I had realized, not very long before, that Philadelphia only had thirty thousand people in it – it practically lifted me out of my chair.

It is no longer acceptable in British politics to be fat or eccentric or religious.

I wrote ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.

Being a fan of authentic Dada, I find today’s art – what I call ‘Bankers’ Dada’ – mind-numbingly dull. The most challenging work I’ve seen of late is by The British Art Resistance. Their document, ‘A Call for Heroes in an Age of Cowards’, is apt in these days of witless chancers.

The British fans are very intense, maybe even more so than fans in the U.S.! They’re great.

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that’s not something I could do.

Tens of thousands of brave Americans died to break the chains of British tyranny so that the principles of our Declaration of Independence could take fold and flourish in the birth of a new nation.

My job is to support businesses, that means promoting British commerce in the big emerging markets that have been neglected in the past. It means keeping Britain open to inward investors, trade and skilled workers. It means cutting red tape which is suffocating growing companies which create jobs.

Sitting down to a meal with an Indian family is different from sitting down to a meal with a British family.

I stand on my public record as a defender of the human rights of Muslims, notably my work for Moazzam Begg and other British Muslims detained without trial in Guantanamo Bay.

Most correspondents came from the former colonial powers – there were British, French, and a lot of Italians, because there were a lot of Italian communities there. And of course there were a lot of Russians.

It was part of your religion to hate the British.

The Seventies were an interesting time to be a reader or writer of fantasy. Tolkien was the great master. Lin Carter was resurrecting wonders of British and American fantasy from the early twentieth century in his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.

We have the British motor industry as a role model for what happens when you try to save an industrial dinosaur. Britain was the first country to industrialise and the first to de-industrialise. We should learn from this.

Further, not only the United States, but the French, British, Germans and the United Nations all thought Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction before the United States intervened.

I think the British audience might be more open-minded with some of my imagery and weird choices.

I like the fact that I have good old-fashioned British teeth with a big gap.

I didn’t really see the British punk movement, if that’s what it was, as wildly original, because I had been listening so intently to all the New York music since 1973, really.

I have a British passport, but the rest of my family have Indian passports, and I am Indian.

The modern Middle East was largely created by the British. It was they who carried the Allied war effort in the region during World War I and who, at its close, principally fashioned its peace. It was a peace presaged by the nickname given the region by covetous British leaders in wartime: ‘The Great Loot.’

Most white Americans only discovered the blues with the British invasion.

Freedom of movement in Europe has been all but abandoned as a cause in British politics. Brexit was far more about freedom of movement than our exact trading relationship with the EU, and the electorate rejected it.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

To be honest, I am very worried about the possibility of the U.K. leaving the E.U. But of course, like in the case of Catalonia, we have to respect the right to decide of the British people on a relationship that part of the Brits consider is not satisfying enough.

No British TV company could ever make a series like ‘The West Wing’ about British politics. It would beggar credibility. No one could write it with a straight face, or perform it without giggling.

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

At the beginning of my career, as a boy from Peru in London, suddenly discovering British culture and society, I looked so much at the work of the photographers Cecil Beaton and Norman Parkinson, which seemed to represent a wonderful vanished grandeur of my new country.

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 love British bands.

I think the majority of the British people are still sanguine about the need for war.

And I grew up watching all the British ones so when you hear that from an early age, it makes it much easier than you guys who don’t grow up with Australian television or British television.

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.