261 Quotes About Britain

I’ll tell you the difference between our countries. Americans think life is serious but not hopeless; the English that life is hopeless but not serious.

I want you to know that I have nothing against Orlando, though you are, of course, far more likely to get shot or robbed there than in London.

Aliens usually missed the point about England by investing its landscape with the passions of its great literature and it had so seldom been seen plainly, without literary footnotes.

England resembles a ship in its shape' wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in English Traits. He was wrong... England, of course, resembles a pig, with something on its back. Look at it. It is a hurrying pig; its snout is the south-west in Wales, and its reaching trotters are Cornwall, and its rump is East Anglia. The whole of Britain looks like a witch riding on a pig, and these contours - rump and snout and bonnet, and the scowling face of Western Scotland - were my route.

To me, Gothic fiction is the literary representation of the stormy gloom of the British Isles.

There was something indomitable about Maria – like Britannia. He’d heard that she kept her head during a Chilean earthquake the year before when men of greater age and experience had panicked. Afterwards she was discovered calmly taking notes, recording the way the land hand risen, for publication, she said.

The austerity choice was made long ago by British government that inequality is a price worth paying for growth.

All we can infer (from the archaeological shards dug up in Berkshire, Devon and Yorkshire) is that the first Britons, whoever they were and however they came, arrived from elsewhere. The land (Britain) was once utterly uninhibited. Then people came.

I yet contend that the mobs in the streets of Hitler's Germany were those in the streets not by the will of the German state, but by the will of the western world, including those architects of human freedom, the British...