Britain Quotes - Page 18

• If Britain was to close down altogether overnight, then China would take up the slack of carbon emissions in two years. If America closed down, just the growth in China's emissions would replace America's emissions in 12 years.

  Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

  Years, Two, Carbon Emissions

  "Monckton saves the day!". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. May 6, 2007.

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• We have to create security for the working families of Britain, and that's what I'll do

  Ed Miliband

  Security

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• This very individualistic form of Protestant Christianity that became so basic in English and then American life is to a large degree responsible for the historical success of Britain and America.

  Walter Russell Mead

  Britain And America, Historical, Degrees

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• Eighty percent of the people of Britain want more money spent on public transport — in order that other people will travel on the buses so that there is more room for them to drive their cars.

  John Gummer

  Order, People, Car

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• Every generation has its war. I have just been reminded of mine. It ended in 1989, 43 years after it began, the longest war Britain fought and certainly the most expensive. Its climax was total victory. Yet there was no parade, no medals, no colours hung in cathedrals. The Cold War saw no battles and cost almost no blood. Where there is no blood there is no glory and hence no history. Asked What did you do in the war, Daddy?, I could say only that I paid my taxes and left it at that.

  Simon Jenkins

  War, Blood, Years

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• Much of America is now in need of an equivalent of Mrs. Thatcher's privatization program in 1980s Britain, or post-Soviet Eastern Europe's economic liberalization in the early Nineties. It's hard to close down government bodies, but it should be possible to sell them off. And a side benefit to outsourcing the Bureau of Government Agencies and the Agency of Government Bureaus is that you'd also be privatizing public-sector unions, which are the biggest and most direct assault on freedom, civic integrity, and fiscal solvency.

  Mark Steyn

  Integrity, Agency, Government

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• The English are loth to express their feelings, but in my stall in the choir I could feel the pent-up, passionate emotion, and also the fear of the congregation, not of death or wounds or material loss, but of defeat and the final ruin of Britain.

  Winston Churchill

  Loss, Feelings, Finals

  Winston Churchill (1986). “Their Finest Hour”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I'm definitely an American, because I grew up here. But I've lived very happily in Britain.

  Bill Bryson

  Grew Up, Grew

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• No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.

  Neil Kinnock

  War, House, Majority

  "Neil Kinnock: 'This election is about now and the future'". Interview with David Hare, www.theguardian.com. April 12, 2010.

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• I take notice of those who have argued consistently for the modernisation of the E.U., but so many of the skeptics in Britain are just hostile to the whole European idea.

  Neil Kinnock

  Ideas, Skeptic, Modernisation

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• I am the last of Britain's stately homos.

  Quentin Crisp

  Lasts

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• Immigrants provide skills that we simply cannot afford to do without. They have contributed hugely to Britain's success.

  Charles Kennedy

  Skills, Immigrants

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• In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

  Julian Barnes

  Dubious, Sometimes, Influence

  Julian Barnes, Vanessa Guignery, Ryan Roberts (2009). “Conversations with Julian Barnes”, p.64, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding.

  John Lahr

  Drama, Past, Thinking

  John Lahr (2015). “Joy Ride: Lives of the Theatricals”, p.408, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Britain won its wars on the playing fields of Eton. America developed its mettle at the muddy gaps of the Cumberlands, in the swift rapids of its rivers, on the limitless reaches of its western plains, in the silent vastness of primeval forests, and in the blizzard-ridden passes of the Rockies and Coast ranges.

  Harvey Broome

  War, Rivers, America

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• Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.

  Clive James

  Funny, Girl, Humorous

  Clive James (2013). “The Complete Unreliable Memoirs”, p.286, Pan Macmillan

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• [Criticizing as "appalingly complacent" a Conservative Government report that by the '60s, Britain would be producing all the scientists needed] Of course we shall, if we don't give science its proper place in our national life. We shall no doubt be training all the bullfighters we need, because we don't use many.

  Harold Wilson

  Science, Government, Giving

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• Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for 14 year olds now to establish friendships with 26 year olds - because they know by the age of 14 all they are ever going to know.

  Theodore Dalrymple

  Children, Growing Up, Years

  "Our Culture, What’s Left Of It". Interview with Jamie Glazov, archive.frontpagemag.com. August 31, 2005.

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• We do not always appreciate the role the Queen has played in one of the most significant changes in the past 60 years: the transformation of Britain into a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society. No one does interfaith better than the Royal family, and it starts with the Queen herself.

  Jonathan Sacks

  Queens, Past, Years

  "The Queen’s Multi-faith Society" by Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 31, 2012.

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• My roots are still in Britain, that's where I live, that's the place where I come from.

  Miranda Richardson

  Roots, Stills

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• If you were born in Britain after World War II, you see a continuous atmosphere of decline, moral and economic and political.

  Stephen Bayley

  War, Political, Atmosphere

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• You lose power in Britain and you are just Joe Public again.

  Ken Livingstone

  Loses

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• Britain's an island; it's always had a constant ebb and flow of immigration - it makes it a better place.

  John Lydon

  Islands, Ebb And Flow, Immigration

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• Here's the truth. The proposed top rate of income tax is not 50 per cent. It is 50 per cent plus 1.5 per cent national insurance paid by employees plus 13.3 per cent paid by employers. That's not 50 per cent. Two years from now, Britain will have the highest tax rate on earned income of any developed country.

  Andrew Lloyd Webber

  Country, Truth, Years

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• With a diplomat father, for whom foreign postings were a fact of life, my siblings and I were expected to attend boarding schools in Britain.

  Arabella Weir

  Father, Sibling, School

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