United Kingdom Quotes

“Britain still thinks it's 1999.”

“I can't bear Britain in decline. I just can't.”

“The sound of modern Britain is a complex harmony, not a male voice choir.”

“The British tourist is always happy abroad as long as the natives are waiters.”

“We shall have to learn again to be one nation, or one day we shall be no nation.”

“British democracy approves the principles of movable party heads and unwaggable national tails.”

“Nothing like a cuppa after an oggy-boggy that finished up better than a slap in the face with a wet kipper.”

“Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king.”

“Five generations ago, Britain was ashamed to write books in her own tongue. Now her language is spoken in all quarters of the globe.”

“Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonour. They chose dishonour. They will have war.”

“Oh England oh Scotland return the wind to sails,
Loose the flame again from the dragon of Wales,
Let Ireland blaze, as lady justice is raised,
And a balance returns to her scales.”

“Britain is blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous.”

“I came to office with one deliberate intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society – from a give-it-to-me, to a do-it-yourself nation. A get-up-and-go, instead of a sit-back-and-wait-for-it Britain.”

“When Britain first, at heaven's command,
Arose from out of the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung this strain:
“Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves.””

“We have been told, to-day, that it was a woman that agitated Great Britain to its very centre, before emancipation could be effected in her colonies. Woman must go hand in hand with man in every great and noble cause, if success would be insured.”

“Dear land of hope, thy hope is crowned! God make thee mightier yet... By truth maintained, thine empire shall be strong... Land of hope and glory, mother of the free! How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee? God, who made thee mighty? Make thee mightier yet.”

“When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, 'In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken'. Some chicken! Some neck!”

“I want to help try and build a more responsible society here in Britain, one where we don't just ask what are my entitlements but what are my responsibilities, one where we don't ask what am I just owed but more what can I give, and a guide for that society that those that can should and those who can't we will always help.”

“(On Britain’s tilt to the Indo-Pacific: ‘Old theme park’) You know, here’s our old friend – what’s his name – the British prime minister waxing lyrical down there in Cornwall. I mean, Britain is like an old theme park sliding into the Atlantic compared to modern China. China is just going to be huge.”

“... the twelve or fifteen millions in the British Empire, who, while they possess no electoral rights, are yet persuaded they are freemen, and who are mystified into the notion that they are not political bondmen, by that great juggle of the ‘English Constitution’—a thing of monopolies, and Church-craft, and sinecures, armorial hocus-pocus, primogeniture, and pageantry!”