British Quotes

I can always tell if a band has a British rhythm section due to the gritty production.

The British are so funny. It's like they can't believe I lived in Hackney. 'You could live in Bondi Beach. Why would you want to live in 'Ackney?' But Hackney's fantastic. I'm serious. There are so many artists there. I loved the markets, the parks, the pubs, the diversity. It was a cultural melting-pot.

The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it's completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.

When people say England, they sometimes mean Great Britain, sometimes the United Kingdom, sometimes the British Isles, - but never England.

I think you can look at the British economy with confidence.

Although I don't have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears.

I don't know why British actors are getting big parts in American TV shows. Maybe it's because we're cheap.

For over 30 years, the IRA showed that the British government could not rule Ireland on its own terms.

It has been argued that British girls are incapable of deep feeling or brilliant acting owing to their lack of temperament. This, I am positive, is not true.

All British people have plain names, and that works pretty well over there.

My job is to support businesses, that means promoting British commerce in the big emerging markets that have been neglected in the past. It means keeping Britain open to inward investors, trade and skilled workers. It means cutting red tape which is suffocating growing companies which create jobs.

We've already recognized that it is absolutely essential for British children to learn other languages and we will be working hard to put further strategies in place to ensure this.

Americans are a lot more open, of course. There's something more declamatory in the way you express emotions. It's a stereotype but it's true. British people can appear repressed in expressing emotions. Not very good at self-evaluating, or affirming situations, touching, anything like that.

Only when I came to America did I think of myself as British.

If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

Between Clive Owen winning at the Golden Globes and the British Academy announcing its nominations, of which Sideways received only one, I'm feeling pretty humbled these days.

I think you know that I classify science as British science, American science, and everybody else.

If there is to be any hope of prosperity for this country it is by reversing that policy which made us simply the kitchen garden for supplying the British with cheap food.

When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.

The most likely victim of actual religious discrimination in British society is a Muslim, but the person who is most likely to feel slighted because of their religion is an evangelical Christian.

When I was in England doing Romeo and Juliet as a child star, I was interviewed by the British press, who are even more vicious and cruel than the Americans. So I have been extremely guarded ever since.

When you are covering a life-or-death struggle, as British reporters were in 1940, it is legitimate and right to go along with military censorship, and in fact in situations like that there wouldn't be any press without the censorship.

I'm not at all fed up with British films, but I am fed up with playing upper-class people.

I'd be quite excited to play somebody British.

The truth is that neither British nor American imperialism was or is idealistic. It has always been driven by economic or strategic interests.

The U.K. needs a system for family migration underpinned by three simple principles. One: that those who come here should do so on the basis of a genuine relationship. Two: that migrants should be able to pay their way. And three: that they are able to integrate into British society.

I had been in a film, playing a young British aristocrat. My wife told me that she was invited to a dinner and she invited me to dinner and the hostess had seen me and said, 'You cannot bring him.' but I think that I've done enough to shatter the image.

In recent times, European nations, with the use of gunpowder and other technical improvements in warfare, controlled practically the whole world. One, the British Empire, brought under one government a quarter of the earth and its inhabitants.

Not only the priceless heritage of our fathers, of our seamen, of our Empire builders is being thrown away in a war that serves no British interests - but our alliance leader Stalin dreams of nothing but the destruction of that heritage of our fathers?

What I hope is in five years' time, I can go to the British people in the election and say: Lots of you doubted that coalition politics worked, but it has worked.