British People Quotes

“Personally I like the English style better. It is not quite so brittle, and the people as a rule, just wear clothes and drink drinks. There is more sense of background, as if Cheesecake Manor really existed all around and not just the part the camera sees; there are more long walks over the Downs and the characters don’t all try to behave as if they had just been tested by MGM. The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

“The British and Americans are two people separated by a common language.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?”
― James Michener

“This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“According to Yiannis' sister Irini, who had trained as a hairdresser in London, the British spent their long winters in grey and black, and this was why they chose such gaudy colours for the summer: turquoise with blue, orange with pink, mauve with indigo. Colours that didn't go well with the bleached hair of the women and the reddish flush of tans that resulted from too great a greediness for the sun, as if Mother Nature, who hated to be hurried, had imprinted her exasperation on their skin.”
― Alison Fell, The Element -inth in Greek

“If an Englishman asks you ‘how are you?’, they only expect two possible answers: ‘not bad’ and ‘not too bad’. The former means ‘I am doing great’, the latter that you are about to commit suicide or have some terminal disease. With anything else, you risk being tarred and feathered. Also, if your answer is ‘excellent’ they take it as sarcasm.”
― Angela Kiss, How to Be an Alien in England: A Guide to the English

“In our towns and cities they will continue to be born, in our communities they will go on to be nurtured & radicalised & from within our neighbourhoods they will terrorise & murder our citizens including women & children in their attempt to destroy the very fabric & order of our civilised society. They are influenced by our ignorance, our lack of knowledge is their power, martyrdom in the name of their God and prophet is their aspiration & so it is critical that we waste no time & learn more about them & this ideology they follow before we can even begin to eradicate this chilling & growing endemic Islamic faith based terrorism’.”
― Cal Sarwar

“The British boy suffers the greatest restraint during the period when the call of nature, the instincts of play and adventure, are most urgent. Naturally, he looks eagerly forward to the time of escape, which he fondly imagines will be when his boyhood is over and he is free of masters.”
― William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

“Once Burns had admitted frankly that the most difficult thing he had to learn at Oxford was the English. What was it that David had said last summer? 'We are becoming a nation of professional eccentrics. Foreigners provide us with a stage, and we enjoy our little appearances all the more because we convince everyone, including ourselves, that we don't even notice the audience.”
― Helen MacInnes, Friends and Lovers

“If Britain ever had an actual government of merit and character, it would have severed all ties with the stone-age system of monarchy long time ago.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Heart Force One: Need No Gun to Defend Society

“The royal family may be too primitive to look at the people as humans instead of their loyal subjects, but how can a civilized people of a civilized world be so dumb, so primitive, so lacking in self-respect, that they don't mind endorsing such passive, if not active, subjugation by complying to the moral anarchy of the british monarchy!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Making Britain Civilized: How to Gain Readmission to The Human Race

“Wracam do mego stosunku do Anglii i rzeczy angielskich. Bezwarunkowo nie jestem bynajmniej wyjątkiem w tym, że miałem wysoce rozwiniętą anglomanię, jakiś prawie że mistyczny kult dla kultury brytyjskiej i jej przedstawicieli. Mam wrażenie, że wytworzyło się to u mnie w pierwszym rzędzie skutkiem bezpośredniego wrażenia, jakie na mnie Anglicy robili. Podróżowałem dość dużo - przed przyjazdem do Wielkiej Brytanii i za granicą spotykałem oczywiście wszędzie dużo Anglików. Bezpośrednie i zupełnie przygniatające wrażenie nieopisanego szyku, wyższości w wyglądzie, manierach, ruchach - wszystko to stawiało mi Anglików na jakimś piedestale, otaczało nimbem tego nieuchwytnego atrybutu, który określamy wyrazami "rasa", "arystokratyczność" - atrybuty, który musi być wynikiem zasadniczych cech duszy ludzkiej, skoro zeń płyną wszystkie uczucia snobizmu, megalomanii towarzyskiej, a nawet cały ustrój "towarzystwa". Anglicy byli dla mnie, jednym słowem, arystokracją narodów, byli jako naród tym, czym jest "towarzystwo" w danym społeczeństwie.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term

“I have no doubts there is racism in the USA towards British people because of the July 4th Independence Day celebration of USA victory over the British.”
― Steven Magee

“What else was the vaunted British sense of fair play but a manifestation of our morality? Gandhi and Das's genius was that they realised that better than we did ourselves. They recognised that when it came down to it, the British and the Indians weren't that different, and the way to beat us was to appeal to our better natures — to make us comprehend the moral incongruity of our position in India.”
― Abir Mukherjee, Smoke and Ashes

“And we British considered ourselves a moral people. What else was the vaunted British sense of fair play but a manifestation of our morality?”
― Abir Mukherjee, Smoke and Ashes