British Quotes - Page 28

• Shakespeare villains were extraordinary. Macbeth, Iago, Richard III... They're so richly layered that a British actor would find it almost impossible to create a two-dimensional villain, if he's explored in his early years or continues to explore his Shakespearean heritage. You can almost not judge them, if they're played really well.

  Ben Kingsley

  Years, Two, Judging

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• A British villain never loses their sense of humour.

  Tom Hooper

  Villain, Humour, Loses

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• I think British humour is very cruel, and gay humour is very cruel. I think the two go hand-in-hand and that's why they mix so well in England. I think that's why you get so many gay comedians in England that are accepted so well because British humour is very cruel. I love it.

  Jason Sellards

  Gay, Thinking, Hands

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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• British humour is very cruel. It's my favourite kind of humour; if it isn't cruel and funny it doesn't really cut the cake for me.

  Jason Sellards

  Cutting, Cake, Kind

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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• It's daunting trying to do any service as an American to such a beautiful, fluid speech pattern that you [British] all have. We are just barbarians in comparison.

  Jake Gyllenhaal

  Beautiful, Trying, Speech

  "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - Jake Gyllenhaal interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• British press think entirely in clichés, and when they do come across creative work, they think that it must be based on something, because they don't realize that you can create things that aren't based on things.

  John Cleese

  Thinking, Creative, Realizing

  Interview with Sam Adams, www.avclub.com. October 22, 2009.

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• It was the British rockers that saved me. They brought me to a different generation altogether [in the 60th]. The Who and The Yardbirds and Georgie Fame and Van Morrison and all those people. The only person who ever did my songs in [ U.S] country was Bonnie Raitt.

  Mose Allison

  Country, Song, People

  Interview with Jason Heller, www.avclub.com. April 02, 2010.

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• It is a curious fact about British Islanders, who hate drill and have not been invaded for nearly a thousand years, that as danger comes nearer and grows they become progressively less nervous; when it is imminent the are fierce, when it is mortal they are fearless.

  Winston Churchill

  Hate, Years, Fearless

  Winston Churchill (1986). “The Gathering Storm”, p.354, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I do not wonder that British youth is in revolt against the morbid doctrine that nothing matters but the equal sharing of miseries; that what used to be called the submerged tenth can only be rescued by bringing the other nine-tenths down to their le.

  Winston Churchill

  Matter, Nine, Doctrine

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• Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Children, Teaching, Tolerance

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• It is doubtless wise, when a reform is introduced, to try to persuade the British public that it is not a reform at all; but appearances must be kept up to some extent at least.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Wise, Trying, Reform

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• We must endeavor to forget our former love for them [the British] and to hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

  Thomas Jefferson

  War, Enemy, Forget

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• I had the patriotic conviction that, given great leadership of the sort I heard from Winston Churchill in the radio broadcasts to which we listened, there was almost nothing that the British people could not do.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Patriotic, People, Great Leadership

  Margaret Thatcher (1995). “The path to power”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• When we affect to condemn savages, we should remember that by doing so we asperse our own progenitors; for they were savages also.Who can swear that among the naked British barbarians sent to Rome to be stared at more than 1500 years ago, the ancestor of Bacon might not have been found?--Why, among the very Thugs of India, or the bloody Dyaks of Borneo, exists the germ of all that is intellectually elevated and grand. We are all of us--Anglo-Saxons, Dyaks and Indians--sprung from one head and made in one image.

  Herman Melville

  Thug, Rome, Years

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• It is plain and demonstrable, that much ale is not good for Yankee, and operates differently upon them from what it does upon a Briton; ale must be drank in a fog and a drizzle.

  Herman Melville

  Yankees, Fog, Doe

  Herman Melville (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)”, p.1232, Delphi Classics

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• Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Pride, Power, Men

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• Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market.

  Mark Twain

  Men, Museums, Machines

  Mark Twain (1973). “What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings”, p.87, Univ of California Press

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• Yesterday I visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart. The present is burdened too much with the past.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Crush, Heart, Past

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Julian Hawthorne (2015). “Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of “The Scarlet Letter”, “The House of Seven Gables” and “Twice-Told Tales””, p.634, e-artnow

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• If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.

  Ishmael Reed

  Brooklyn Bridge, Bridges, America

  Ishmael Reed (2013). “Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel”, p.18, Open Road Media

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• Our [British] summers are often, though beautiful for verdure, so cold, that they are rather cold winters.

  Horace Walpole

  Beautiful, Summer, Winter

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• People fail you, children disappoint you, thieves break in, moths corrupt, but an Order of the British Empire goes on for ever.

  Fay Weldon

  Children, Order, People

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• The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life.

  Clive James

  Country, Food, People

  Clive James (2013). “The Complete Unreliable Memoirs”, p.294, Pan Macmillan

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

  Georges Duhamel

  Taken, Courtesy, Britain

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• The British people are the boss.

  Tony Blair

  People, Boss

  "The Guardian view on the Chilcot report: a country ruined, trust shattered, a reputation trashed". www.theguardian.com. July 6, 2016.

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• Absolute monarchy,... is the easiest death, the true Euthanasia of the BRITISH constitution.

  David Hume

  Death, Constitution, Euthanasia

  David Hume (1862). “Essays moral, political, and literary. (Life of the author, etc.).”, p.32

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