British History Quotes - Page 4

• Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.

  Felix Frankfurter

  Men, History, House

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• England totally disarmed and an easy prey to hostile forces! Can you think of anything more likely to excite cupidity and hostile intention? We should sink to the level of a fifth rate Power, our Colonies would be stripped from us, our commerce would decline, famine and unemployment would stalk the land... I have yet to learn that the cause of peace can be served by rendering our country impotent.

  Stanley Baldwin

  Country, Thinking, Land

  "Semi-detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations". Book by Martin Ceadel, p. 271, 2000.

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• I went back in British history. Some 204 people died there after a mine collapsed in 1838. In 1866, 361 miners died in Britain. In an explosion in 1894, 290 people died there.

  Recep Tayyip Erdogan

  People, Usual, Offensive

  "Turkey’s Many Occupational Hazards" by Ozan Varol, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 16, 2014.

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• As well as might we say that a ship is built, loaded and manned for the sake of any particular pilot, instead of acknowledging that the pilot is made for the sake of the ship, her lading, and her crew, who are always the owners in the political vessel; as to say that kingdoms were instituted for kings, not kings for kingdoms.

  Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

  Kings, History, Political

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• Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been different, but the result would once again be disaster. What happened in America was really round two of those wars - the civil war of the British Empire, with the Hanoverians playing the part of the Stuarts, and the Americans the heirs of the revolutionaries, of Cromwell and of William III, the inheritors of a true British liberty, that had somehow got lost in its own motherland.

  Simon Schama

  War, Two, America

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• The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Fighting, History, Police

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• The male clerk with his quill pen and copper-plate handwriting had gone for good. The female short-hand typist took his place. It was a decisive moment in women's emancipation.

  A. J. P. Taylor

  Hands, History, Clerks

  A. J. P. Taylor (2001). “English History 1914-1945”, p.38, Oxford Paperbacks

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• Yes, making mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep... For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that an' Chuck him out, the brute! But it's Saviour of his country, when the guns begins to shoot!

  Rudyard Kipling

  Country, Sleep, Gun

  Rudyard Kipling, “Tommy”

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• There is little doubt that, until 1846 when he helped to engineer the resignation of Robert Peel, Disraeli was driven by an ambition to make his mark rather than by any consistent political purpose, and that his attacks on Peel would have not have been so mounted had he been given in 1841 the office for which he had asked.

  Christopher Hibbert

  Ambition, History, Office

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• Disraeli was now at the height of his fame and popularity. He still had his enemies... But the people as a whole now admired and respected him deeply... His unscrupulous past and cynical opportunism were being largely forgotten or forgiven. He was gradually becoming recognized not only as the prophet of a new Conservatism, at once compassionate at home and positive abroad, but as a great statesmen whom the Queen did well to honour. Power had brought responsibility. By 1878 the transformation in public attitudes towards Disraeli was complete.

  Christopher Hibbert

  Queens, Attitude, Responsibility

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• The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.

  Simon Schama

  History, England, Thrones

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• Let valour end my life!

  Walter Raleigh

  History, Ends, Valour

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• A bottomless pit of violence, a Tower of Babel where all are speakers and no hearers.

  Alexander Smith

  History, Tower Of Babel, Towers

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• He had done that which could never be forgiven; he was in the grasp of one who never forgave.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  History, Done, Forgiven

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• Armed Soldier, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom; doing God's judgement on the Enemies of God. It is a phenomenon not of joyful nature; no, but of awful, to be looked at with pious terror and awe.

  Thomas Carlyle

  History, Judgement, Soldier

  Thomas Carlyle (1871). “Works”, p.144

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• Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.

  Dean Acheson

  History, Roles, Empires

  Speech at U.S. Military Academy,West Point, N.Y., 5 Dec. 1962

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• There is no other Parliament like the English. For the ordinary man, elected to any senate, from Perisa to Peru, they may be a certain satisfaction in being elected... but the man who steps into the English Parliament takes his place in a pageant that has ever been filing by since the birth of English history... York or Lancaster, Protestant or Catholic, Court or Country, Roundhead or Cavalier, Whig or Tory, Liberal or Conservative, Labour or Unionist, they all fit into that long pageant that no other country in the world can show.

  Josiah Wedgwood

  Country, Men, English History

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• The great theme of modern British history is the fate of freedom. The 18th century inherits, after the Civil War, this very peculiar political animal. It's not a democracy, but it's not a tyranny. It's not like the rest of the world, the rest of Europe. There is a parliament, laws have to be made, elections are made.

  Simon Schama

  War, Fate, Animal

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• Virtually every war fought since the Act of Union had gone badly at some stage, but before 1783 none had ended in defeat. Nor would any major war in which Britain was involved after this date end in defeat. Those who are curious about this country's peculiar social and political stability probably need look no further than this for essential cause.

  Linda Colley

  Country, War, Political

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• Chilvalry's essential function, Maurice Keen has written, is always to hold up an idealised image of armed conflict in defiance of the harsh realities of actual warfare. By definition, chivalry also reaffirms the paramount importance of custom, hierarchy and inherited rank.

  Linda Colley

  Reality, Essentials, Warfare

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• In the past, the British had signally failed to build an effective structure of royal authority and administration in their American colonies. As a result, no possibility existed of soothing and winning over influential and talented Americans, in the way that influential and talented Scotsmen were increasingly being won over, by giving them increased access to state employment.

  Linda Colley

  Winning, Past, Giving

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.136, Yale University Press

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• A British imperium enabled Scots to feel themselves peers of the Ebglish in a way still denied them in an island kingdom. The language bears that out very clearly. The English and the foreign are still all too inclined to refer to the island of Great Britain as 'England'. But at no time have they ever customarily referred to an English empire.

  Linda Colley

  Islands, Peers, Kingdoms

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• In the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, as in so many later conflicts, British women seem to have been no more markedly pacifist than men. Instead, and exactly like so many of their male countrymen, some women found ways of combining support for the national interest with a measure of self-promotion. By assisting the war effort, women demonstrated that their concerns were by no means confined to the domestic sphere. Under cover of a patriotism that was often genuine and profound, they carved out for themselves a real if precarious place in the public sphere.

  Linda Colley

  Real, War, Mean

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• I was born a Scotsman and a bare one. Therefore I was born to fight my way in the world.

  Walter Scott

  Fighting, World, Way

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• In the last quarter of the 20th century, Britons have been understandably obsessed with the problem of having too little power in the world. In the third quarter of the 18th century, by contrast, their forebears were perplexed by the problem of having acquired too much power too quickly over too many people.

  Linda Colley

  People, World, Littles

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