British Officer Quotes & Sayings

Reputation is what you have when you come to a new community; character is what you have when you go away. — William Davis

There was a loud shuffling above. A line of redcoats took their position at the edge of the ravine and aimed down at the rebels.
"Present!" the British officer screamed to his men.
"Present!" yelled the American officer. His men brought the butts of their muskets up to their shoulders and sighted down the long barrels, ready to shoot and kill.
I pressed my face into the earth, unable to plan a course of escape. My mind would not be mastered and thought only of the wretched, lying, foul, silly girl who was the cause of everything.
I thought of Isabel and I missed her.
"FIRE! — Laurie Halse Anderson

Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. — Terence McKenna

...You, you look -- bien -- exactly what you were, a high-ranking British officer, used to unwavering obedience and with the air of a Greek god, gazing down on us mere mortals. — Marguerite Kaye

As you know very well,' said Stephen, 'I am in favour of leaving people alone, however imperfect their polity may seem. It appears to me that you must not tell other nations how to set their house in order; nor must you compel them to be happy. But I too am a naval officer, brother; long, long ago you taught me that anyone nourished on ship's biscuit must learn to choose the lesser of two weevils. On that basis alone I may be said to have no objection to Moahu's becoming a nominal British possession. — Patrick O'Brian

Why is it that, despite having achieved previously undreamed-of miracles of progress, we seem more helpless in facing life than our less privileged ancestors were? The answer seems clear: while humankind collectively has increased its material powers a thousandfold, it has not advanced very far in terms of improving the content of experience. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I'd heard theories. Destruction of forests had altered pressure zones. Global warming made for stronger storms. Chemtrails indicated government manipulation of the weather. God punished the family and neighbors of idolaters. — Carl-John X. Veraja

In Highland New Guinea, now Popua New Guinea, a British district officer named James Taylor contacted a mountain village, above three thousand feet, whose tribe had never seen any trace of the outside world. It was the 1930s. He described the courage of one villager. One day, on the airstrip hacked from the mountains near his village, this man cut vines and lashed himself to the fuselage of Taylor's airplane shortly before it took off. He explained calmly to his loved ones that, no matter what happened to him, he had to see where it came from. — Annie Dillard

It's fun to challenge yourself and take advantage of all the opportunities that present themselves. — Perez Hilton

I've been a Danish prince, a Texas slave-dealer, an Arab sheik, a Cheyenne Dog Soldier, and a Yankee navy lieutenant in my time, among other things, and none of 'em was as hard to sustain as my lifetime's impersonation of a British officer and gentleman. — George MacDonald Fraser

In a few days an officer came to our camp, under a flag of truce, and informed Hamilton, then a captain of artillery, but afterwards the aid of General Washington, that Captain Hale had been arrested within the British lines condemned as a spy, and executed that morning. — William Hull

Simultaneously a small commando force of Husayn's Arabs, commanded by a British officer, blew up the Damascus-to-Medina railway north of Aqaba, interrupting the flow of Turkish reinforcements to the Hijaz. In the Hijaz itself an Arab force commanded by Husayn's son Feisal, supported by three British warships, had captured the port of Wejd towards the northern end of the Red Sea. — Barbara Bray

The whales," explained Katie, "are going to invade."
"Can I tell you a story, girls?" The police officer leaned back and rested his heels on his computer keyboard. He said patiently, "In the nineteen-sixties there was something called the British Invasion. But no British people really invaded us. It was called an invasion, but all that happened was a lot of British bands sold a lot of records in the United States."
"So you're saying," said Katie, "that really these whales are just going to release a lot of hit singles."
"Don't get fresh," said the police officer. "I'm saying that just because there was something called the British Invasion doesn't mean you should be afraid of British people. See what I mean? The British have never invaded America."
Lily mumbled, "What about the War of 1812?"
"What about it?"
"They burned down Washington D.C. — M T Anderson

I can't stand to watch anything that I'm in. I tear it apart. The worst thing you can do is leave me alone and let me watch what I'm in. It's abusive. — Elias Koteas

It is absolutely bedrock to the British Army's philosophy that a commanding officer is responsible for what goes on within his command. — Mike Jackson

The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen - all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs. — George Orwell

My grandmother on my father's side, a nightclub singer, was a Jewish refugee from Prussia who ended up in Jerusalem, where she met my grandfather - a British army officer. I remember as a child having bowls of chicken soup made by her. There were lots of interesting components, like feet and necks. — Jamie Cullum

Yeah. Floyd is his batman."
His what?"
Batman, like in the British army, each officer had a batman, a personal servant."
You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don't make you money than anybody I know. — Robert B. Parker

Didn't It belong to her just a little bit, not in a material way but in the way a house always belonged to all those who have lived and loved and suffered in it? As if it had kept behind a small part of your soul. — Beatriz Williams

Human mental identities are not like shoes, of which we can only wear one pair at a time. We are all multi-dimensional beings. Whether a Mr. Patel in London will think of himself primarily as an Indian, a British citizen, a Hindu, a Gujarati-speaker, an ex-colonist from Kenya, a member of a specific caste or kin-group, or in some other capacity depends on whether he faces an immigration officer, a Pakistani, a Sikh or Moslem, a Bengali-speaker, and so on. There is no single platonic essence of Patel. He is all these and more at the same time. — Eric Hobsbawm

On the last analysis, then, love is life. Love never faileth and life never faileth so long as there is love. — Henry Drummond

I fought to stay awake and keep the car on the road. And I thought back to texts I had read from the British Army in India, during the Raj, at the height of their empire. Young subalterns trapped in junior ranks had their own mess. They would dine together in splendid dress uniforms and talk about their chances of promotion. But they had none, unless a superior officer died. Dead men's shoes was the rule. So they would raise their crystal glasses of fine French wine and toast "bloody wars and dread diseases" because a casualty further up the chain of command was their only way to get ahead. Brutal, but that's how it's always been, in the military. — Lee Child

An SJH, in ballistics shorthand. It was a brutally efficient piece of ordnance. Not exactly a dum-dum, named after Dum-Dum, India, where a British army officer had invented a bullet that mushroomed out on impact and acted as a miniature wrecking ball inside the body. Innovation wasn't always good for you. The .45 SJH had blown right through the front of Cassie Decker's skull and ended up lodged deep in her brain. It had been dug out of her during the autopsy and the slug preserved as evidence in her murder investigation. It had retained enough of its shape — David Baldacci

They had straddled the British trenches, 'crushing the sides of our own trench out of shape with their machine-guns swivelling around and firing like mad.' Their commanding officer furiously rained blows on the side of one of them with his staff cane, trying to get them to stop. Nobody knew what they were, except that they were British. 'There was a bulge on each side with the door in the bulging part,' observed Chaney, 'and machine-guns on swivels poked out from either side. — Robert Kershaw

I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself. — John Le Carre

Higher salaries were not the only way the government strove to staunch the bleeding. In the past, before admin salaries were raised, government leaders intervened when officers they considered key were targeted. Dr Goh Keng Swee, then still in the Cabinet, once told me: "We only let you take those we were prepared to release." In one celebrated case, in the early 1960s, he personally stepped in to stop one important hire. The paper's British management had recruited Herman Hochstadt, a rising young officer who later became permanent secretary. The morning he was to start work, even before he could settle in his chair at Times House, he found that Dr Goh had demanded his return to the civil service. — Cheong Yip Seng

Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods. It would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to tax) but "to bind us in all cases whatsoever," and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious, for so unlimited a power can belong only to God. — Thomas Paine

In the time between the two wars, a British colonial officer said that with the invention of the airplane the world has no secrets left. However, he said, there is one last mystery. There is a large country on the Roof of the World, where strange things happen. There are monks who have the ability to separate mind from body, shamans and oracles who make government decisions, and a God-King who lives in a skyscraper-like palace in the Forbidden City of Llhasa. — Heinrich Harrer

Indeed, the most important product of knowledge is ignorance. — David Gross

As I suffer in the defence of my Country, I must consider this hour as the most glorious of my life -Remember that I die as becomes a British Officer, while the manner of my death must reflect disgrace on your Commander. — John Andre

General Joseph O. Mauborgne, who became Chief Signal Officer in October, 1937. Mauborgne had long been interested in cryptology. In 1914, as a young first lieutenant, he achieved the first recorded solution of a cipher known as the Playfair, then used by the British as their field cipher. He described his technique in a 19-page pamphlet that was the first publication on cryptology issued by the United States government. In World War I, he put together several cryptographic elements to create the only theoretically unbreakable cipher, and promoted the first automatic cipher machine, with which the unbreakable cipher was associated. He was among the first to send and receive radio messages in airplanes. As — David Kahn

This was the way into Burr. I knew he and Hamilton circled each other all their lives, I knew they went from friends to frenemies to foes, but it wasn't til I read this detail online - that Theodosia was married to a British officer when Aaron Burr met her, and he waited until she was available - that the character of Burr came free in my imagination. Imagine Hamilton waiting - for anything. That's when I realized our task was to dramatize not two ideological opposites, but a fundamental difference in temperament. — Lin-Manuel Miranda