British History Quotes - Page 2

• Your loss we count as our loss. Your struggle we take as our struggle.

  Tony Blair

  Struggle, Loss, History

  "Profiles of Lance Armstrong, Tony Blair, Osama bin Laden". “CNN People In The News”, www.cnn.com. July 16, 2005.

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• The pre-war empire had been sufficiently informal and sufficiently cheap for Parliament to claim authority over it without having to concern itself too much about what this authority entailed. The post-war empire necessitated a much greater investment in administrative machinery and military force. This build-up of control had to be paid for, either by British taxpayers or by their colonists.

  Linda Colley

  Military, War, Empires

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• We fight to exist. Personally, I am not ashamed of fighting to exist. We are doing no very extraordinary thing to fight simply because we do not wish to be enslaved or exterminated.

  Donald Woods Winnicott

  Fighting, History, Wish

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• No people in the world other than the English would have had the courage, in the midst of war, to tell the people such unvarnished truth.

  Anton Walbrook

  War, People, History

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• Labour leaders lead us all, though we know they bleed us all. Cheer our new Decline and Fall, Gibbon might have dreamed it all.

  Noel Coward

  Cheer, Fall, History

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• This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.

  A. N. Wilson

  War, Mistake, Book

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• Jacobitism involved much more than a debate about the merits of a particular dynasty. Men and women were well aware that its success was almost certain to involved them in civil war. And the more politically educated knew that the Stuart Pretender was a pawn in a worldwide struggle for commercial and imperial primacy between Britain and France.

  Linda Colley

  War, Struggle, Men

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.79, Yale University Press

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• A country scratching a lazy irritation at sagging doorjambs and late trains, whose greatest attribute is a collective, smelly tolerance, where a chap will put up with almost everything, which means he won't care about anything enough to get out of a chair.A country of public insouciance and private, grubby guilt, where you can believe anything as long as you don't believe it too fervently. A country where the highest aspiration is for a quiet life.

  A. A. Gill

  Country, Believe, Mean

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• Most of our people have never had it so good.

  Harold MacMillan

  People, History

  Speech, Bedford, England, 20 July 1957.

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• We had to do what we had to do - Britain is great again.

  Margaret Thatcher

  History, Britain

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• These men were very much in the minority, but of course, being the 'Elect', they expected to be in a minority - the party of redemption. In fact they glorified in the slightness of their numbers, the self-purifying troop of Gideon's army... stormtroopers in the front line of the Reformation.

  Simon Schama

  Party, Army, Men

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• Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional monarch.

  Simon Schama

  History, Incapable, Monarchs

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• In 1688 England contracted to the Netherlands the highest debt that one nation can owe to another. Herself not knowing how to recover her liberties, they were restored by men of the United Provinces.

  George Bancroft

  Men, Knowing, History

  George Bancroft (1875). “History of the United States: From the Discovery of the American Continent”, p.59

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• Royal relationships across the generations have often been strained and distant, rather than close and affectionate. Most eldest sons, interminably waiting to become king, have not been on the best of terms with the sovereign to whose death they look forward with a debilitating combination of guilt-ridden anxiety and eager anticipation. And younger sons (and daughters, too) have often found their lives empty of purpose: cut off by their royal statius, but unable to find anything rewarding with which to fill the time.

  David Cannadine

  Daughter, Kings, Son

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• In the early 21st century, it is easy to condemn the Bond books for being racist and imperialist, sexist and misogynist, elitist and sadistic. But this is merely another way of saying that we cannot understand the Bond books without reference to the personality, the outlook and the 'Tory imagination' of the man who wrote them, and to the time in which he wrote them; and that we cannot understand the 1950s and 1960s without some reference to them, and to him.

  David Cannadine

  Book, Men, Imagination

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• It would be wrong to interpret the growth of British national consciousness in this period in terms of a new cultural and political uniformity being resolutely imposed on the peripheries of the island by its centre. For many poorer and less literate Britons, Scotland, Wales and England remained more potent rallying calls than Great Britain, except in times of danger from abroad. And even among the politically educated, it was common to think in terms of dual nationalities, not a single national identity.

  Linda Colley

  Thinking, Islands, Scotland

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• Most Britons still lived and died without encountering anyone whose skin colour was different from their own. Slaves, in short, did not threaten, at least as far as the British at home were concerned. Bestowing freedom upon them seemed therefore purely an act of humanity and will, an achievement that would be to Great Britain's economic detriment, perhaps, but would have few other domestic consequences.

  Linda Colley

  Home, Achievement, Humanity

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• Loyal and substansial Catholic service on the battlefield undermined one of the most longstanding objections to emancipation: namely, that since Catholics owed religious allegiance to a foreign authority in the person of the Pope, their political and patriotic allegiance must necessarily be suspect.

  Linda Colley

  Religious, Patriotic, Political

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• Ever since the Reformation, the case of legislation confining Catholics had been constructed primarily to protect a nervously Protestant against what was assumed to be a fifth column in its midst... Ministers believedm with some justice, that Catholics retained an attachment to their exiled co-religionists, the princes of the House of Stuart. After the Battle of Culloden had confirmed Jacobitism's insignificance, however, government attitudes towards Catholicism began perceptibly and logically to relax.

  Linda Colley

  Attitude, Government, Attachment

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• Cruel and paradoxical though it undoubtedly is, the record shows that yje most succesful 20th century monarchs have been those who were not actually born to succeed. King George VI was 41 when the abdication of Edward VIII propelled him suddenly and unexpectedly to take up the crown; and Queen Elizabeth II spent her first decade with no inkling thay she herself might one day have to reign. Taken together, these examples suggest that the best preparation for the job of sovereign is not to be prepared for it at all, ir not to be too well prepared for it, or for too long.

  David Cannadine

  Kings, Jobs, Queens

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• I am a man of peace. I am longing and working and praying for peace, but I will not surrender the safety and security of the British constitution. You placed me in power eighteen months ago by the largest majority accorded to any party for many, many years. Have I done anything to forfeit that confidence? Cannot you trust me to ensure a square deal to secure even justice between man and man?

  Stanley Baldwin

  Party, Men, Squares

  Speech on BBC radio on the General Strike on May 08, 1926. "Baldwin: A Biography". Book by Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, p. 415, 1969.

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• A fundamental reason why Britain was not torn apart by civil war after 1688 was that its inhabitants' aggression was channelled so regularly and so remorsely into war and imperial expansion abroad.

  Linda Colley

  War, Expansion, Torn Apart

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.53, Yale University Press

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• From the 15th century to 1688, England and Wales, like Scotland, had been peripheral kingdoms in the European power game, more often at war with each other that with Continental powers, and - except under Oliver Cromwell - scarcely very successful on those occasions when they did engage the Dutch, or the French, or the Spanish.

  Linda Colley

  War, Successful, Games

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.53, Yale University Press

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• There is a golden thread which runs through British history of the individual, standing firm against tyranny and then of the individual participating in his society

  Gordon Brown

  Running, Golden, Economics

  Gordon Brown (2006). “Moving Britain Forward: Selected Speeches, 1997-2006”, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• There are important arguments to be made about the relative merits of an hereditary or an elected head of state: but not at the level of the human frailties of particular monarchs or presidents. No one seriously contends that the American presidency should be abolished because Bill Clinton is a self-confessed adulterer. So why should the abolition of the British monarchy be contemplated because the same is true of Prince Charles?

  David Cannadine

  Self, Important, President

  David Cannadine (1998). “History in Our Time”, Penguin Group USA

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