Quotes About Britain

The 1970s - I was ten in 1975 - were a bad decade in all sorts of ways but the middle class had comfortable assumptions about the prospects for its children. The middle class was smaller then; it was a much less competitive Britain, less meritocratic.

Let me give you an idea of Fifties Britain. The war had ended ten years before, and most people had returned to their gardens and allotments hoping life would revert to how it was before the hostilities.

I made a very concerted decision to go to drama school in the United States. But I did have the opportunity to go to Britain's Central School of Speech and Drama, and my dad and I had a few tense words about that. He wanted me to go to British drama school.

Britain First is an extremist organisation which seeks to divide communities through their use of hateful narratives which spread lies and stoke tensions.

Britain is not in the single currency, and we're not going to be. But we all need the eurozone to have the right governance and structures to secure a successful currency for the long term.

Britain can choose, as others are, short term fixes and more stimulus. Or we can lead the world with long-term solutions to long-term problems.

In Britain you're more used to challenging drama. In America, TV is just boring, and numbing, and bloody terrible.

There is tension all over the country. The party in Bengal has done substantial work. They have eliminated a few officers. The Englishmen are terrified. As a result, they have started sending their families to Britain. After some time, they will realise that they cannot exercise authority over India.

When Napoleon abdicated in April 1814, Britain expected that America would soon lose heart and surrender, too. From then on, London's chief aims were to bring a swift conclusion to the war and capture as much territory as possible in order to gain the best advantage in the inevitable peace talks.

We believe that government in Britain is there to protect people from terrorism and from the worst criminality, but never at the expense of our civil liberties and the basic tenets of our legal system.

I think the right way to deal with terrorism is to carry on with normal life, like Britain used to when it was a more serious country.

Britain must lead in Europe to intensify the fight against global terrorism and make our country safer.

But more than anything else, for the British folks Irish people were all terrorists. So when we went to Britain, it was always a lot of resistance to U2. And that's why we came to America.

In 1955 Australia and Canada supplied 61 per cent of British wheat imports, while Australia and New Zealand contributed 60 per cent of its meat imports. By contrast, the Six remained a net importer of food until 1958.47 As late as 1960, two-thirds of British exports and perhaps 90 per cent of capital investment went outside Europe.48

8 In a speech at the opening of the European Research Institute in 2001, Tony Blair summarised 'the history of our engagement with Europe' as 'one of opportunities missed in the name of illusions – and Britain suffering as a result'.

In Britain, and in many parts of her former Empire, the blame for the death toll is generally laid on the incompetence and callousness of the Great War generals, especially the British generals. In France, they blame their politicians; in Germany, historians blame the Kaiser.

Italy also demanded that Britain should fund Italy's part in the war and provide the Italian Army with artillery.

Britain really is an immense lunatic asylum. That is one of the things that distinguishes us among the nations. We have a very flexible conception of normality.

To be a smuggler in Britain was to be in good company, for

wanted England to heed the peace treaty and relinquish its western forts in the Ohio River valley. The one place where Hamilton deviated from official policy was in applauding Britain's refusal to hand over slaves who had defected during the Revolution. "To have given up these men to their masters, after the assurances of protection held out to them, was impossible," Hamilton told Beckwith.

The success of the abolitionist movement lay in its making real for people in Britain and America the slave ship's pervasive and utterly instrumental terror, which was indeed its defining feature.

In Britain, any degree of success is met with envy and resentment.

decision the president would make in 1948 would prove to be equally profound on the shape of world history when Truman decided to recognize Israel's existence following Britain's rapid withdrawal in 1948 from Palestine.

Back when the United States was ordering its doctors to block up all legal supplies of heroin and breaking Henry Smith Williams's brother, doctors in Britain flatly refused to fall into line.