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Quotes About Britain

A ley line is what might be called a field of force, a trail of telluric energy. There are hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, all over Britain, and they've been around since the Stone Age.
~ Stephen R. Lawhead
Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.
~ Jonathan Swift
Nevertheless, the movement of intelligence over western and southern Europe was as rapid in Caesar's day as at any time before the railway. In 54 B.C.. Caesar's letter from Britain reached Cicero at Rome in twenty-nine days; in 1834 Sir Robert Peel, hurrying from Rome to London, required thirty days.20
~ Will Durant
He had not even considered the military value to the West of Czechoslovakia's thirty-five well-trained, well-armed divisions entrenched behind their strong mountain fortifications at a time when Britain could put only two divisions in France and when the German Army was incapable of fighting on two fronts and, according to the German generals, even incapable of penetrating the Czech defenses. Now
~ William L. Shirer
by the end of the Middle Ages, which had seen Britain and France emerge as unified nations, Germany remained a crazy patchwork of some three hundred individual states. It was this lack of national development which largely determined the course of German history from the end of the Middle Ages to midway in the nineteenth century and made it so different from that of the other great nations of Western Europe.
~ William L. Shirer
BERLIN, June 18 It's in the bag, signed today in London. The Wilhelmstrasse quite elated. Germany gets a U-boat tonnage equal to Britain's. Why the British have agreed to this is beyond me. German submarines almost beat them in the last war, and may in the next.
~ William L. Shirer
Few qualms of conscience are to be found in the memoirs of those who exercised command in the wars for highly questionable causes that Britain and the U.S.A. waged in the nineteenth century.
~ Heinz Guderian
Freedom of the press in Britain is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertiser's won't object to.
~ Helen Swaffer
Re America & Britain] we are two countries divided by a common language
~ Helene Hanff
Great Britain, an island off the Dutch coast, which is responsible for the happiness of fully one-quarter of the human race. Per: Van Loon's Geography, Copy-write 1932. Garden City Publishing, Copy-write 1937; Page-216.
~ Hendrik Willem van Loon
Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, told Ambassador Robert Murphy, a Dulles emissary, that, if Great Britain did not confront Nasser now, "Britain would become another Netherlands.
~ Henry Kissinger
In recent decades, Europe has retreated to the conduct of soft power. But besieged as it is on almost all frontiers by upheavals and migration, Europe, including Britain, can avoid turning into a victim of circumstance only by assuming a more active role.
~ Henry Kissinger
In America there are far more patients, and therefore more patients with such tumours. The patients are less deferential and trusting than they are in Britain. They are more like consumers than petitioners, so they are more likely to make sure that they are treated by an experienced surgeon.
~ Henry Marsh
'Federalism', in the context of political and media usage in Britain, has come to mean the creation and imposition of a European superstate, one centralised in Brussels.
~ Charles Kennedy
James Goldsmith is important because he used the power of the markets to break up the cosy patrician elite that ran Britain and its industries in the 1950s and '60s. In the process, Goldsmith helped transfer power in this country away from politics and towards the markets and the financial sector.
~ Adam Curtis
Britain has been responsible for the undermining of democracy, turning a blind eye to abuses by its allies, using extraordinary rendition to get around the rule of law, passing over the denial of individual liberties to dissidents, and the evasion of the dismal situation for religious minorities.
~ Deeyah Khan
We must do our utmost to preserve our British ally's strategic independence from Europe.
~ Richard Perle
At some point in the future - possibly the very near future - Britain will be hit by a deadly pandemic, and its impact could be utterly devastating.
~ Hannah Fry
The '60s in London obviously brought about the explosion of music, the 'Beatles' especially, and then the 'Rolling Stones' and other forms of music, and then fashion and photography and films - kitchen-sink dramas we called them at that time, which was our 'nouvelle vague' in Britain, films that talk about real life.
~ Charlotte Rampling
The forefathers of the United States were children of religious bigotry and persecution, and, as a result, fled Britain to create a new approach to life and government. They valued intellect and education. In fact, they outlined the principles of the United States' democracy to establish intellectual freedom from the Church.
~ Mike Medavoy
Britain never regained its naval and economic dominance over the world, and it remains notoriously conflicted ("Brexit") about its role in Europe. But Britain is still among the world's six richest nations, is still a parliamentary democracy under a figurehead monarch, is still a world leader in science and technology, and still maintains as its currency the pound sterling rather than the euro
~ Jared Diamond
Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe's most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe.
~ Jared Diamond
While Japan and Britain look at a glance similar in area and isolation, Japan is actually five times farther from the continent (110 versus 22 miles), and 50% larger in area and much more fertile.
~ Jared Diamond
Then, as now, nobody talked about the legacy of Empire. Britain had colonised, owned, occupied or interfered with half the world. We had carved up some countries and created others. When some of the world we had made by force wanted something in return, we were outraged.
~ Jeanette Winterson