Quotes About Britain

We can and must support our MPs in doing the job they will be elected to do: to hold the government to account in order to do what's best for Britain.

Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.

Germany made every effort to acquire a small empire in the bits left unclaimed in Africa, China and the Pacific, only to lose it all to Britain after the First World War. All this was a signal that, by the late 19th century, being the largest empire no longer guaranteed having the largest economy.

At the end of the second Opium War (in which it was joined by France), Britain forced the Chinese to fully legalize both the trade in opium and the shipment of Chinese indentured labourers to the Americas (where they worked as slaves in all but name).

In terms of cost and effectiveness, the air force tenets were simply wrong. In any case, only Britain and America had really prepared themselves in the way of designing heavy bombers for long-range heavy bombardment. And this was not a response to Hitler's aggressions; it started well before Hitler came to power.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, most people in Britain lived in small village communities. They knew all their neighbours. They dressed alike, and almost all were white. The vast majority belonged to the same religion and spoke much the same language.

For such a small country, Britain packs in an amazing diversity of landscapes: coastline, lakes, mountains, rolling countryside, villages and great cities.

I am firmly of the view we should keep the police out of politics in Britain, or we risk going the way of American politics, where the Whitewater investigation lasted virtually the whole of the two terms of the Clinton administration but turned up nothing.

Every human on the planet is descended from both slaves and slave owners. What makes Britain unusual is not that we engaged in the disgusting trade, but that we eliminated it. Our political institutions led us, earlier than many, to the conclusion that freedom was the highest virtue.

Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.

Britain is not homogenous; it was never a society without conflict. The English fought tooth and nail over everything we know of as English political virtues - rule of law, free speech, the franchise.

The recession of the late 1980s was a very visible humiliation. Cities across Britain had become the victims of botched battlefield surgery - surgery that involved the ripping up of factories, the flattening of buildings, and the razing of the Victorian heritage of heavy labour.

For good or for ill, Britain is in some respects moving away from a prime-ministerial system towards a presidential one. This is emphatically not, as is sometimes argued, simply a function of Tony Blair's personal ambition. The shift towards a more presidential style was already visible under Margaret Thatcher.

I don't just want a better deal for Britain. I want a better deal for Europe too. So I speak as British prime minister with a positive vision for the future of the European Union. A future in which Britain wants, and should want, to play a committed and active part.

In the industrial revolution Britain led the world in advances that enabled mass production: trade exchanges, transportation, factory technology and new skills needed for the new industrialised world.

It's not a matter of if economies around the world becoming low-carbon, but when and how: through struggle and strife or through advancement and progressive leadership. Larry Elliot described it today as the 'Green New Deal.' It's a leadership we in Britain can provide, and from which our economy can benefit.

The challenges facing Britain required not just a cool head, but a heart burning with the desire for change - not business as usual but a bold vision.

One of the most beautiful things about Britain, apart from the NHS and the free education, is the British Army.

We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country. We are there so the people of Britain and our global interests are not threatened.

In Britain, Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809–98) opposed suffrage because to involve women in politics would be, he said, 'to trespass upon the delicacy, the purity, the refinement, the elevation of their nature'.

America had long been saying that Britain had better find a role for herself in Europe; there was no place for Britain beside the US on the world stage – she must go and join the chorus

He sought, and found, a very large readership among the educated men and women of his day, in Britain, and in Europe more widely. What he wanted from his readers, but did not always get, was a willingness to join him in a certain kind of discursive space, in a kind of conversation

By the war's end, Poland was the fourth largest contributor to the Allied effort in Europe, after the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain and its Commonwealth.

The drama of Dunkirk and the eloquence of Churchill helped convince many Americans that their country must give Britain all possible support in its lonely struggle against Germany.