Quotes About Britain

When I was in the Far East, I was asked not to mention the Big Crunch, because of the effect it might have on the market. But the markets crashed, so maybe the story got out somehow. In Britain, people don't seem too worried about a possible end twenty billion years in the future. You can do quite a lot of eating, drinking and being merry before that.

Yesterday, the president met with a group he calls the coalition of the willing. Or, as the rest of the world calls them, Britain and Spain

I went on to explain that it is an honour, and also that we need a transport policy. "If by 'we' you mean Britain, that's perfectly true," he acknowledged. "But if by 'we' you mean you and me and this Department, we need a transport policy like an aperture in the cranial cavity.

We do not always appreciate the role the Queen has played in one of the most significant changes in the past 60 years: the transformation of Britain into a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society. No one does interfaith better than the Royal family, and it starts with the Queen herself.

Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.

Water, running - It was observed in ancient times that ghosts dislike crossing running water. In modern Britain this knowledge is sometimes used against them. In central London a net of artificial channels, or runnels, protects the main shopping district. On a smaller scale, some house-owners build open channels outside their front doors and divert the rainwater along them.

most Britons went about their lives with no idea of the universe of horrors that existed under the British flag or the nightmarish way of life of the slaves, whose existence was nonetheless intimately intertwined with their own way of life thousands of miles away.

When eighteenth-century British society had retreated from the historical Christianity it had earlier embraced, the Christian character of the nation—which had given Britain, among other things, a proud tradition of almshouses to help the poor, dating all the way back to the tenth century—had all but disappeared.

And so, in keeping with its national character, Britain chose a more civilized and decorous path away from religion: it would staunchly retain the outward trappings and forms of religion—which were all well and good and would help keep the lower classes better behaved—but it would deny religion any real power.

Britain continued to use the terms and the symbols of its religion and would never make a vulgar Gallic show of executing clerics, but it would reject real religion nonetheless.

By the time Wilberforce experienced his "Great Change," all of the social problems that would plague eighteenth-century Britain had come to full flower, having been unchecked by the social conscience of genuine Christian faith for nearly a hundred years.

Americans have an outsized tendency to romanticize the past, to see previous eras as magically halcyon and idyllic, and of no era would this be truer than the eighteenth century in Britain.

No reptiles are found there [in Ireland], and no snake can live there; for, though often carried thither out of Britain, as soon as the ship comes near the shore, and the scent of the air reaches them, they die.

For much of the twentieth century, American visitors to Britain found that everything was the wrong temperature: cold, drafty rooms; warm beer and milk; rancid butter and sweating cheese.

Britain's relationship with America might be described as 'special', but only if by 'special' we mean 'frequently dysfunctional'.

In this, they echoed the views of a generation brought up to think of Britain as Great, but now doomed in peacetime to watch the American ascendancy, decolonisation, queues, bureaucracy, socialism and other perceived indignities as the Empire declined.

Elliott and Philby existed within the inner circle of Britain's ruling class, where mutual trust was so absolute and unquestioned that there was no need for elaborate security precautions. They were all part of the same family.

Instead of introducing keen new spies into Britain, the Germans would be helping to recruit, train, finance, and transport a stream of ready-made double agents, precooked and ready to serve.

later, the Channel Islands earned the unhappy distinction of becoming the only part of Britain to be occupied by Germany during the Second World War.

Britain might be in the grip of rationing, but buying the materials for a homemade bomb was a piece of cake. (In fact, obtaining the ingredients for a decent cake would have been rather harder.)

if there had been an Israel earlier in this century, there surely would have been no Holocaust. There would have been a country willing to take the Jewish refugees when America, Britain, and the other nations refused. There would have been a country to press for their departure. And there would have been an army ready to fight for them.

The fraying relic of the gold-exchange standard that remained at the end of the 1920s had collapsed entirely by 1934. Britain, its inspiration and foundation in the nineteenth century, abandoned it with great reluctance and bitterness in September 1931. Twenty-five nations followed in short order. The United States refused to throw in the towel until April 1933, shortly after Roosevelt took office.

People in debt become hopeless and hopeless people don't vote. They always say that that everyone should vote but I think that if the poor in Britain or the United States turned out and voted for people that represented their interests there would be a real democratic revolution.

The London Olympic Opening Ceremony was excellent. The mixture of old and new, of classic and contemporary was a beautiful reflection of Great Britain. Danny Boyle is a genius.