Great Britain Quotes:

What Great Britain calls the Far East is to us the near north.

- Robert Menzies

source: 1939 Quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, 27 Apr. Menzies was one of the first Australian statesmen to recognize the importance to his country of Asia.

topic: East, Britain, Great Britain

For a small island [Great Britain], the place is remarkably diverse.

- William Golding

topic: Islands, Britain, Diverse, Great Britain

No two countries are identical, and obviously, there's a difference between a referendum on a very complex relationship between Great Britain and the rest of Europe, and a presidential election in the United States.

- Barack Obama

source: Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece in Joint Press Conference, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. November 15, 2016.

topic: Country, Europe, Two, Presidential Election, Great Britain

At one level Great Britain at the beginning of the 18th century was like the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, both three and one, and altogether something of a mystery.

- Linda Colley

topic: Christian, Doctrine, Three, Christian Doctrine, Great Britain

It must be owned, that the Graces do not seem to be natives of Great Britain; and I doubt, the best of us here have more of rough than polished diamond.

- Lord Chesterfield

source: 'Letters to his Son' (1774) 18 November 1748

topic: Grace, Doubt, British, Great Britain

Montesquieu well knew, and justly admired, the happy constitution of this country [Great Britain], where fixed and known laws equally restrain monarchy from tyranny and liberty from licentiousness.

- Lord Chesterfield

topic: Country, Law, Liberty, Montesquieu, Great Britain

I am the monarch of the sea, The Ruler of the Queen's Navee, Whose praise Great Britain loudly chants And we are his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!

- Unknown

topic: Cousin, Queens, Aunt, Great Britain

In Great Britain the price of food is at a higher level than in any other country, and consequently, the British artisan labours at a disadvantage in proportion to the higher rate of his food.

- Joseph Hume

topic: Country, Levels, Proportion, Great Britain

Courtesy is not dead - it has merely taken refuge in Great Britain.

- Georges Duhamel

topic: Taken, Courtesy, Refuge, Great Britain

The extremes of opulence and of want are more remarkable, and more constantly obvious, in [Great Britain] than in any other place that I ever saw.

- John Quincy Adams

topic: Want, Opulence, Saws, Great Britain

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

- Dean Acheson

source: 1962 Speech at West Point military academy, 5 Dec. According to the New York Times, 23 Nov1969, Prime Minister Harold Wilson later countered,'Mr Acheson is a distinguished figure who has lost a State Department and not yet found himself a role'.

topic: Roles, Empires, Lost, Special Relationship, Playas

Ireland is a small but insuppressible island half an hour nearer the sunset than Great Britain.

- Tom Kettle

topic: Sunset, Islands, Half, Great Britain

We used to be so proud that our country offered far more economic opportunities than the feudal system in Great Britain, with its royal family, princesses and dukes. But social mobility in the UK is higher than in the US. Our social rift is as big as it was in the 1920s.

- Robert Reich

source: Source: www.spiegel.de

topic: Country, Princess, Opportunity, Social Mobility, Feudal System

Will Great Britain have an unwilling India dragged into war or a willing ally co-operating with her in the prosecution of a defence of true democracy?

- Mahatma Gandhi

source: Mahatma Gandhi (1958). “Collected Works”

topic: War, Democracy, Allies, Great Britain, True Democracy

I don't think I'm prepared to give away my technique to Great Britain. Are you crazy? All I can say is there was a ninja and a fire truck involved, and a great deal of coersion.

- Ryan Reynolds

source: Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

topic: Crazy, Thinking, Fire, Great Britain

We were a Western civilisation, an English speaking civilisation, both NZ and Australia, and we had all these influences coming from both Great Britain and America to us; sending us their culture in the shape and form of movies and television.

- Richard O'Brien

topic: America, Australia, Shapes, English Speaking, Great Britain

The most striking thing Snowden has revealed is the depth of what the NSA and the Five Eyes countries [Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the US] are doing, their hunger for all data, for total bulk dragnet surveillance where they try to collect all communications and do it all sorts of different ways. Their ethos is "collect it all."

- Laura Poitras

source: Source: www.motherjones.com

topic: Country, Communication, Eye, Great Britain

I believe that lack of empathy is behind many problems, and I believe that it's disrupting our society. In Great Britain, there is a steady decline in the willingness to be truly generous, and by that I don't mean monetary generosity, but friendship and sympathy for others.

- J. K. Rowling

source: Source: www.spiegel.de

topic: Believe, Mean, Generosity, Lack Of Empathy, Great Britain

The colleges of Edinburgh and Geneva as seminaries of science, are considered as the two eyes of Europe. While Great Britain and America give the preference to the former, all other countries give it to the latter.

- Thomas Jefferson

source: Thomas Jefferson (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”, p.109

topic: Country, Eye, College, Great Britain, Britain And America

[I]n Great-Britain it is said that their constitution relies on the house of commons for honesty, and the lords for wisdom; whichwould be a rational reliance if honesty were to be bought with money, and if wisdom were hereditary.

- Thomas Jefferson

source: Thomas Jefferson, Richard Holland Johnston, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”

topic: Honesty, Government, House, Great Britain, House Of Commons

The sun of her [Great Britain] glory is fast descending to the horizon. Her philosophy has crossed the Channel, her freedom the Atlantic, and herself seems passing to that awful dissolution, whose issue is not given human foresight to scan.

- Thomas Jefferson

source: Thomas Jefferson (1832). “Notes on the State of Virginia”, p.69

topic: Philosophy, Issues, Horizon, Great Britain

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

topic: Islands, Peers, Kingdoms, Scots, Great Britain

In virtually every Continental state at this time, aristocracies had to live with the risk that their property might be pillaged or confiscated. Only in Great Britain did it prove possible to float the idea that aristocratic property was in some magical and strictly intangible way the people's property also. The fact that hundreds of thousands of men and women today are willing to accept that privately owned country houses and their contents are part of Britain's national heritage is one more proof of how successfully the British elite reconstructed its cultural image in an age of revolution.

- Linda Colley

source: Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.177, Yale University Press

topic: Country, Men, Ideas, Continental, Country Houses

In Great Britain, woman was subordinate and confined. But at least she was also safe.

- Linda Colley

topic: Safe, Britain, Great Britain

An unprecedented number of uniformed males, marching, parading and engaging in mock battles in every region of Great Britain brought a pleasant frisson of excitement into many normally quiet and deeply repetitive female lives.

- Linda Colley

topic: Numbers, Battle, Males, Repetitive, Great Britain

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

topic: Home, Achievement, Humanity, Great Britain, British History

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

topic: Thinking, Islands, Scotland, National Identity, Periphery

It is clear that the flame of True Freedom had passed with naval supremacy and constitutional, consultative government from the United Provinces to Great Britain, where it was regarded with quite as much national pride.

- Peter Padfield

source: Peter Padfield (2000). “Maritime Supremacy & the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World”, Overlook Books

topic: Pride, Government, Flames, Provinces, Great Britain

I think if you've managed Celtic or Rangers you can go on to be Prime Minister of Great Britain, it's that hard.

- Gordon Strachan

topic: Soccer, Football, Thinking, Great Britain

I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work. And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect much else in it besides will suffer a sea-change. It will be, moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating, that the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution.

- John Maynard Keynes

source: John Maynard Keynes (2006). “General Theory Of Employment , Interest And Money”, p.345, Atlantic Publishers & Dist

topic: Wisdom, Order, Sea, Continuance, Great Britain

[To the suggestion that Great Britain might someday want a Republic:] We'll go quietly.

- Queen Elizabeth II

topic: Republic, Want, Might, Great Britain

A single glance at the map will make the reader acquainted with the position of the eastern coast of the island of Great Britain, as connected with the shores of the opposite continent.

- James F. Cooper

topic: Book, Islands, Opposites, Great Britain

The ban doesn't have anything to do with Livestrong or my ability to work in [the cancer] community. Perhaps it speeds it up. I don't know the examples in Great Britain of athletes who have fallen. I know the examples in the United States - the Tiger Woods, the Michael Vicks, even the Bill Clintons - people who are still out there able to work.

- Lance Armstrong

topic: Cancer, Athlete, People, Great Britain, Michael Vick

I will content myself, Mr. Speaker, with those principal motives to union; first, that we are in the rapids and must go on; next that our neighbours will not, on their side, let us rest supinely, even if we could do so from other causes; and thirdly, that by making the united colonies more valuable as an ally to Great Britain, we shall strengthen rather than weaken the imperial connection. (Cheers.

- Thomas D'Arcy McGee

topic: Cheer, Goes On, Unions, Great Britain

From my earliest youth I have regarded the connection between Ireland and Great Britain as the curse of the Irish nation, and felt convinced, that while it lasted, this country would never be free or happy. In consequence, I determined to apply all the powers which my individual efforts could move, in order to separate the two countries.

- Theobald of Bec

topic: Country, Moving, Order, Individual Effort, Great Britain

The immediate success of the war poem anthologies ... proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse ... There has never before, in the world's history, been an epoch which has tolerated and even welcomed such a flood of verse as has been poured forth over Great Britain during the last three years.

- Edmund Gosse

topic: War, Years, Poetry, Great Britain

In Great Britain, an author published a book in which he claimed that Jesus Christ had children. Such statements don't trigger civil unrest and bloodshed in Europe. But write similar statements about Islam in Syria and you might see bloody uprisings.

- Bashar al-Assad

source: ""Poverty Is a Greater Concern for Most than a Democratic Constitution"". Interview with Martin Doerry, www.spiegel.de. August 29, 2005.

topic: Jesus, Children, Book, Great Britain

I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in war I hoped we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations. I am sorry, however, that he has not been mellowed by the great success that has attended him. The whole world would rejoice to see the Hitler of peace and tolerance, and nothing would adorn his name in world history so much as acts of magnanimity and of mercy and of pity to the forlorn and friendless, to the weak and poor.... Let this great man search his own heart and conscience before he accuses anyone of being a warmonger.

- Winston Churchill

source: "Mr. Churchill's Reply". The Times, November 7, 1938.

topic: Sorry, War, Heart, Warmongers, Peace And Tolerance

And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world.

- Jimmy Carter

source: "Bush Is 'the Worst in History' In Foreign Relations, Carter Says". www.washingtonpost.com. May 20, 2007.

topic: Thinking, Iraq, Support, Great Britain

Crushing defeat for Great Britain #Euref. History will show no one won today.

- David Miliband

source: Source: www.mirror.co.uk

topic: Crush, Today, Defeat, Great Britain

The United Kingdom and the European Union will remain indispensable partners of the United States even as they begin negotiating their ongoing relationship to ensure continued stability, security and prosperity for Europe, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the world.

- Barack Obama

source: Source: www.mirror.co.uk

topic: Europe, United States, Ongoing, Great Britain, United Kingdom

With respect to Great Britain, I have a dream, by the way: that the Brits will see that the EU is changing, and change their minds. And then remain in the EU or return to the EU. I am not giving up hope.

- Jaroslaw Kaczynski

source: Source: uk.businessinsider.com

topic: Dream, Giving Up, Mind, Great Britain, Not Giving Up Hope

Germany's potential makes up about 20% of the EU's overall economic power, including Great Britain. The German army is by no means strong enough to guarantee the security of the EU's two endangered flanks - in the east and in the south. So all that remains for Germany is partnerships with its neighbours and other EU member states. Germany should stick to that role.

- Jaroslaw Kaczynski

source: Source: uk.businessinsider.com

topic: Strong, Mean, Army, All That Remains, Economic Power

It is impossible not to bestow the imputation of deliberate imposture and deception upon the gross pretense of a similitude between a king of Great Britain and a magistrate of the character marked out for that of the President of the United States. It is still more impossible to withhold that imputation from the rash and barefaced expedients which have been employed to give success to the attempted imposition.

- Alexander Hamilton

source: Source: www.foxnews.com

topic: Kings, Character, Giving, Great Britain

There has been an Irish lobby that has impacted U.S. foreign policy for a century and a half, and at times made our relations with Great Britain very difficult. Other comparable lobbies exist.

- Samuel P. Huntington

source: Interview with Amina Chaudary, www.theislamicmonthly.com. 2006.

topic: Half, Century, Made, Great Britain

I have shut my mind against nothing and I am a friend of Great Britain. I always have been. I have no axe to grind.

- Mahatma Gandhi

source: Source: gandhiking.ning.com

topic: Mind, Grind, Britain, Great Britain

In Italy there are 5 million legal migrants. They're integrated, and they're welcome. The problem of the Muslim presence is increasingly worrying. There are more and more clashes, more and more demands. And I doubt the compatibility of Italian law with Muslim law, because it's not just a religion but a law. And problems can be seen in Great Britain as well as in Germany, so reassessing our coexistence is fundamental.

- Matteo Salvini

topic: Italian, Law, Worry, Compatibility, Great Britain

I think that the people of Great Britain have had enough of experts with organisations from acronyms saying - from organisations with acronyms - saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong, because these people - these people - are the same ones who got consistently wrong.

- Michael Gove

topic: People, Experts, Had Enough, Great Britain

I don't have to negotiate an arms agreement with Great Britain or with France.

- Barack Obama

source: Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

topic: Agreement, Arms, France, Great Britain

Our allies, Great Britain, Australia, Israel, some of the strongest militaries in the world, allow transgender people to serve openly and have experienced no ill effects from that.

- Allyson Robinson

topic: Israel, Australia, People, Great Britain