Quotes About British

When we pulled in, the customs officer looked in the back. The back of the wagon was filled with cases stenciled PINK FLOYD--LONDON. 'Got Pink Floyd in the back of the car, do you?' he asked. 'Righto, mate. We shrunk 'em and stuck 'em in fookin' boxes, we did,' said Nigel. Amazingly, the customs officer laughed and waved us through.

Wanting to change only the British position at the top of the American social structure, John Adams feared that a "rage for innovation" would consume what was worthwhile about American culture.

While a British band allegedly played a march tune, "The World Turned Upside Down," 7241 British soldiers surrendered their arms.

I'm an Ulsterman of Planter stock. I was born on the island of Ireland, so secondly I'm an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago, so I am British. The British archipelago are offhore islands to the continent of Europe, so I am European.

the British and the Americans still viewed destroyers as ships which could be 'thrown in' against the enemy battle line without regard to consequences – in a word they were 'expendable'.

curry plays a nostalgic, retrogressive role in British culinary culture; the proliferation of restaurants specializing in it is a consolation prize for the loss of world-historical consequence; we are to be understood as having given away the Empire and received in return, in delayed settlement of that very considerable invoice, the street-corner tandoori house.

But apart from that, I was amazed by how little the language had penetrated the place – given, after all, that we Brits had been running the colony for 150 years. Other groups you might well have expected to speak English were, as a rule, remarkable for being monoglot Cantonese:

It's that great British middle-class battle cry: "Something must be done!

In the cafés of Leman Street the only way to get tea without sugar was to put your hand across the cup before they could spoon it in. Such habits were almost solely responsible for British teeth.

Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin, which Germany began, by a Peace which, if it is carried into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have restored, the delicate, complicated organization, already shaken and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live.

hated the British business culture which I saw as slow, bureaucratic, cumbersome, lacking customer service, lacking initiatives.

Aunt Helen Beck had many intentions about her death. She was about being dead the way some people are about being British - she wasn't, and it seemed she would never be, but it was clearly something she aspired to, since all the people she respected were.

Why do British people make such good TV? It's so annoying. Stop it. Is it because they have free health care? Uggh.

A steady flow of loans from the leading banks on Wall Street, led by J.P. Morgan, had enabled the British, French, and Russians to purchase what they needed to sustain the war effort as their gold reserves dwindled from larger and larger war purchases.

to a generation of westerners reared on white supremacist dogmas and Darwinism, the clause seemed to offer a dangerous precedent. Such a clause might apply to the Japanese, British foreign minister Balfour pointed out, but what about central Africa?48 The proposal went nowhere.

German U-boats were poised to impose a blockade of the British Isles that threatened that island nation with starvation as well as defeat.

The priceless copy of Magna Carta on display in the British pavilion was supposed to go home when the fair closed on October 1. After high-level discussion, however, officials thought it would be safer to let it stay in the United States.*

The English-speaking world developed a historical narrative known as the "Black Legend," which portrayed the Spanish as cruel and backward conquistadores who murdered and plundered their way through the Caribbean and Latin America. The British, in contrast (according to their own account), were hard-working, forward-looking colonists (rather than colonizers) who industriously set up self-sufficient farming villages on empty lands.

At the root of Pakistan's national identity crisis has been the unresolved debate on how to square the state's self- proclaimed Islamic identity with the obligations of a modern nation- state. This has been confounded by an official history that cannot explain the gaping inconsistencies between the claims of Muslim nationalism and the actual achievement of statehood at the moment of the British withdrawal.

I think, British food, it's had a bad rap.

We need a new British business bank with a clean balance sheet and an ability to expand lending rapidly to the manufacturers, exporters and high-growth companies that power our economy. Today I can announce we will have one.

To find a new British composer who is really good is rare.

I do occasionally encounter a British business that delivers what and when, and for exactly the price, they promised. But commercial paragons in the U.K. are rare.

British politics, as the world knows, is a joke. Yet it's rarely funny.