British Thought Quotes & Sayings

It came as a great shock to me when I heard that England and Soviet Russia had become allies. So much so that I thought that the people responsible in London were acting in a manner that no longer coincided with British imperial interests. — John Amery

Even though the Olympics take place during Ramadan, some Muslim athletes said they will not fast during games. Then, after sampling the British food, they said, on second thought, fasting sounds good. — Conan O'Brien

A team of British lawyers has now concluded that the Declaration of Independence was illegal, and the American colonies had no right to secede from England. Well, you thought our court system was backed up. — Jay Leno

Growing up as a kid my father was British and a soccer player. His idol was a guy that passed the ball a lot, Stanley Matthews. Our family thought if you could be unselfish your teammates would always like you. — Adam Oates

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

People were kind and friendly and amusing, but they thought that companionship and conversation were synonymous, and some of them had voices that jarred in your head. There was a lot to be said for dogs. They understood without telling you so, and they were always pleasing to look at, awake or asleep, like Bingo. He slept now, with little whistling snores, in his basket at the side of the fire, his stubby legs and one whiskery eyebrow twitching to the fitful tempo of his dreams. — Monica Dickens

The British have turned their sense of humour into a national virtue. It is odd, because through much of history, humour has been considered cheap, and laughter something for the lower orders. But British aristocrats didn't care a damn about what people thought of them, so they made humour acceptable. — Theodore Zeldin

I mean, i was into their music and everything way before I knew what they looked like, but they had their pictures in the CD insert and when Victoria and I got it, we were both like, "Why, hellooooo there." Plus, they were British. I'm a sucker for cute boys with guitars, as you may have noticed, but throw in a London accent and I'll happily sell my soul without a second thought. — Robin Benway

I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings. — Walter Dean Myers

Right from the outset, the prevailing mindset in British comics fandom was a radical and progressive one. We were all proto-hippies, and we all thought that comics would be greatly improved if everything was a bit psychedelic like Jim Steranko. — Alan Moore

We now reflexly, and dishonestly, unmask all virtue as hypocritical, all beauty as Kitsch; and have become so jaded with simplicity and wholesomeness that we find Good insipid and crave the sharp stimulus of sin. — Bruce G. Charlton

I remember I was really into this British band, The Vapors, with that song "Turning Japanese." I thought that they were really next level genius cryptic weirdos. And then I realized when I got older they are just using a lot of British words, and I didn't know what they meant. But I thought, Oh, they are making up their own language. — Craig Finn

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility, or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law, or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self-improvement. — J.K. Rowling

The English, he thought, had once conquered most of the known world, but their cooking hadn't improved as a result. — Lavie Tidhar

the cobra effect." As the story goes, a British overlord in colonial India thought there were far too many cobras in Delhi. So he offered a cash bounty for every cobra skin. The incentive worked well - so well, in fact, that it gave rise to a new industry: cobra farming. Indians began to breed, raise, and slaughter the snakes to take advantage of the bounty. Eventually the bounty was rescinded - whereupon the cobra farmers did the logical thing and set their snakes free, — Anonymous

The confidence and security of a people can be measured by their attitude toward laxatives. At the high noon of the British sun, soldiers in far-flung outposts of the Empire doctored themselves with "a spoonful o' gunpowder in a cuppa 'ot tea." Purveyors and users of harsh laxatives were not afraid of being thought mean and unfriendly just because their laxatives were. But in America, the need to be nice is so consuming that nobody would dare take a laxative that makes you run up the stairs two at a time, pushing others aside and yelling, "Get out of the way! — Florence King

He hadn't known many British, but some of them seemed crazy to him, and so it seemed a small thing to agree to - and Wally thought it was wise to agree with whoever it was who held the catheter. — John Irving

Shades of Harry the deserter, I thought furiously. What in God's name is the British army coming to? Glorious traditions, my aunt Fanny. — Diana Gabaldon

Elusive, spectacular, utterly at home, the fact of these British goshawks makes me happy. Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands. The wild can be human work. It — Helen Macdonald

I thought, If people are going to write about what I'm wearing, then I would wear young British designers who need the publicity. — Emma Watson

My brothers and sisters of America, there is not the least shadow of hope that India can ever be Christianised. After two hundred years of vain efforts and of spending millions of dollars with the prestige of the conqueror and backed by British bayonets, Christianity is not supported by the converts themselves. Every bit of Protestant Christianity in India is maintained partly by the money flowing from England and America, and partly by taxes imposed upon the Hindus against their will, which must be paid although the people starve.
The people of India as a whole are saturated with religious and philosophical thought. They think and ponder on spiritual matters from childhood to death. Even the street-sweeper is frequently more profoundly versed in subtle metaphysics and divine wisdom than the missionary sent to convert him. — Virchand Gandhi

Helen Rosevere was a British medical missionary in the Congo years ago during an uprising. Her faith was strong and her trust was confident, yet she was raped and assaulted and treated brutally. Commenting later, she said, "I must ask myself a question as if it came directly from the Lord, 'Can you thank Me for trusting you with this experience even if I never tell you why?'" What a profound thought. God has trusted each of us with our own set of unfair circumstances and unexplained experiences to deal with. Can we still trust in Him even if He never tells us why? — Charles R. Swindoll

A sad, plangent music. In the British camp, Sharpe thought, they would be singing, but no one was singing here. — Bernard Cornwell

All these stuff she's done before - the rosary, the deep thoughts, the faux British accent. It's the same thing over and over. She's be so much better if she just retired, and I like Madonna. — Andrea Tantaros

The first modern propaganda agency was the British Ministry of Information a century ago, which secretly defined its task as to direct the thought of most of the world - primarily progressive American intellectuals, who had to be mobilized to come to the aid of Britain during World War I. — Noam Chomsky

I have always thought we should think less about the British film industry as an entity, and more about getting British talent working. — Eric Fellner

The British are a peculiar race. My grandfather was transported to Malaya because they needed tin, and yet I've never once met a Briton to whom the thought had occurred that perhaps I spoke English because I am from one of their colonies. It is as if I were a piece of chess in a game played by people who never look down at their fingers. — Zen Cho

Brandeis thought that the British should allow more Jews into Palestine. It was not only their obligation under the Balfour Declaration; it was the only way Jews could be saved from Hitler. When — Lewis J. Paper

Churchill admired the division of powers in the American government, but he thought they were copied from much older British practices. In 1950 he said: [T]he division of ruling power has always been for more than 500 years the aim of the British people. The division of power is the keynote of our parliamentary system and of the constitutions we have spread all over the world. The idea of checks and counter checks; the resistance to the theory that one man, or group of men, can by sweeping gestures and decisions reduce all the rest of us to subservience; these have always been the war cries of the British nation and the division of power has always been one of the war cries of the British people. And from here the principle was carried to America. The scheme of the American Constitution was framed to prevent any one man or any one lot, getting arbitrary control of the whole nation. — Larry P Arnn

Is it far?" she asked.
"About three hours, ma'am," he said, keeping his eyes on the pavement.
"Another three hours." She tried to think of something witty and British to say. "I already feel like a thrice-used tea bag."
He didn't smile.
"Oh. Um, I'm Jane. What's your name?"
He shook his head. "Not allowed to say."
Of course, she thought, I'm entering Austenland. The servant class is invisible. — Shannon Hale

in 3000 b.c....in spain, france, the british isles and old europe, the lives of people centered on nature and motherhood. they honored mother nature, mother earth and mother creator. women were revered as the givers of life. as creators, they were thought to be connected to diety. statues of the goddesses of these early people were of full-breasted women with bodies clearly depicting the ballooning abdomen of women about to give birth. these primal people regarded birthing as the highest manifestation of nature. when a woman gave birth, everyone gathered around her in the temple for the "celebration of life." birthing was a religious rite, and not at all the painful ordeal it came to be years later. — Marie F. Mongan

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

I left the court feeling sure that Rose West would never walk free again. That thought made me happy. — Stephen Richards

At 31 years of age, Fred West was a big man trapped in a little man's body. He thought himself to be a gynecologist and Warren Beatty look-a-like all rolled into one ... the surgeon and the stud. — Stephen Richards

I know you have not thought about it. Italians always act without thinking, it's the glory and the downfall of your civilisation. A German plans a month in advance what his bowel movements will be at Easter, and the British plan everything in retrospect, so it always looks as though everything occurred as they intended. The French plan everything whilst appearing to be having a party, and the Spanish ... well, God knows. Anyway, Pelagia is Greek, that's my point. — Louis De Bernieres

I was one of those kids who thought I could be the president of England when I grew up if I wanted to. Then I started acting and realized life is hard and people are mean. And there's no president of England and I'm not British. — Riley Keough

I like 'The Office.' I particularly like the British version with Ricky Gervais. Of course, I liked the 'Seinfeld' show a lot. I thought that was an awfully good show. — Dick Van Dyke

In World War One it was the propaganda of our side that first made "propaganda" so opprobrious a term. Fouled by close association with "the Hun," the word did not regain its innocence - not even when the Allied propaganda used to tar "the Hun" had been belatedly exposed to the American and British people. Indeed, as they learned more and more about the outright lies, exaggerations and half-truths used on them by their own governments, both populations came, understandably, to see "propaganda" as a weapon even more perfidious than they had thought when they had not perceived themselves as its real target. Thus did the word's demonic implications only harden through the Twenties, in spite of certain random efforts to redeem it. — Edward L. Bernays

Deism" in its own day referred not to a superficial theological doctrine but to a comprehensive intellectual tradition that ranged freely across the terrain we now associate with ethics, political theory, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology. It was an astonishingly coherent and systematic body of thought, closer to a way of being than any particular dogma, and it retained its essential elements over a span of centuries, not decades. In origin and substance, deism was neither British nor Christian, as the conventional view supposes, but largely ancient, pagan, and continental, and it spread in America far beyond the educated elite. — Matthew Stewart

NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system:

Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). Once Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.

The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated. — Neil Gaiman

If the British had fought half as well as this one kissed, she thought, the Americas would still be a colony. — Anonymous

I started looking at fashion magazines, specifically 'British Vogue.' I was reading a lot about Cecil Beaton. Then I thought maybe I should start collecting. — Hamish Bowles

At one point I emailed to ask if it was true, as my daughter had told me, that the Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn't. — Walter Isaacson

Strange it was that the British commander-in-chief, known for his chronic gambling, seemed to give no thought to how his American opponent might play his hand. O — David McCullough

In defense of King, country, and family, he would unhesitatingly have sacrificed his virtue to Nessie, had that been required. If it was a question of Olivia marrying a man with syphilis and half the British army being exterminated in battle, versus himself experiencing a "personal interview" with Richard Caswell, though, he rather thought Olivia and the King had best look to their own devices. — Diana Gabaldon

Unless nonviolence of the strong is really developed among us, there should be no thought of civil disobedience for Swaraj, whether within the states or in British India. — Mahatma Gandhi

Canada evolved within the British Empire: it inherited the Parliamentary system, the Cabinet system and all the other features of the British constitutional system which had been in place, for the most part, for several centuries before Canada was even thought of. — Stockwell Day

I would have thought you'd import an English staff?"
"Good heavens, no! I would not wish a British chef on anyone except the French tax collectors. — Dan Brown

We thought being offered the M.B.E. [Member of the Order of the British Empire] was as funny as everybody else thought it was. Why? What for? We didn't believe it. It was a part we didn't want. We all met and agreed it was daft. — John Lennon

As he followed Wood, Jury thought: one disappearance, two auto accident victims, one in a mental institution, one drowned. One murdered. Rackmoor, for all its bracing sea air, didn't seem the healthiest place in the British Isles. — Martha Grimes

I thought they were going to kill me there and then, which would have been a relief. To my horror, they spoke words that I will never forget: 'We are going to keep you in the cellar and let our black friends use you and when they have finished with you, we will kill you and bury you under the paving stones of Gloucester. There are hundreds of girls there, the police haven't found them and they wont find you! — Stephen Richards

London was like a machine. We were all being shot backwards and forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern. The British Museum was another department of the factory. The swing-doors swung open; and there one stood under the vast dome, as if one where a thought in the huge bald fore head which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names. — Virginia Woolf

Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard ... Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill ... At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer. — John Searle

Weetabix - a British cereal biscuit whose taste and texture are generally thought to be improved by the addition of monkey come. — Christopher Moore

If you read British Foreign Office records from the 1940s, it's clear they recognised that their day in the sun was over and that Britain would have to be the "junior partner" of the United States, and sometimes treated in a humiliating way. A striking example of this was in 1962, the time of the Cuban missile crisis. The Kennedy planners were making some very dangerous choices and pursuing policies which they thought had a good chance of leading to nuclear war, and they knew that Britain would be wiped out. The US wouldn't, because Russia's missiles couldn't reach there, but Britain would be wiped out. — Noam Chomsky

The British soldier who thought himself superior, actually became so. — John Graves Simcoe

I always thought of myself as being the unluckiest girl I knew. I was, I believed, a 'jinx' and I was 'jinxed', or so I thought! — Stephen Richards

Thus did I begin to see, or thought I began to see, how the British Conservatives kept the fierce, irrational loyalty of those whom they exploited. — Christopher Hitchens

The [sexual harassment] situation has gotten so out of hand that, in 1993, in one of the first British cases, a plumber was fired for continuing to use the traditional term "ballcock" for the toilet flotation unit, instead of the new politically correct term, sanitized of sexual suggestiveness. This is insane. We are back to the Victorian era, when table legs had to be draped lest they put the thought of ladies' legs into someone's dirty mind. — Camille Paglia

When someone leaves you, apart from missing them, apart from the fact that the whole little world you've created together collapses, and that everything you see or do reminds you of them, the worst is the thought that they tried you out and, in the end, the whole sum of parts adds up to you got stamped REJECT by the one you love. How can you not be left with the personal confidence of a passed over British Rail sandwich? — Helen Fielding

One would have thought that if there was one cause in the world which the Conservative party would have hastened to defend, it would be the cause of the British Empire in India ... Our fight is hard. It will also be long ... But win or lose, we must do our duty. If the British people are to lose their Indian Empire, they shall do so with their eyes open. — Winston Churchill

It's because Gandhi believed in villages and because the British ruled from the cities; therefore, Nehru thought of New Delhi as an un-Indian city. — Nandan Nilekani

All the things that you would have thought would have made me a professional A1 criminal ... wrong. I decided that was too lazy and easy, and because of the way British society is, quite frankly you were denied an education, so I got one of my own. — John Lydon

A five-week sand blizzard?" said Deep Thought haughtily. "You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff. — Douglas Adams

She remembered the way the damp, coarse sand had clumped to her legs and hands, and burrowed beneath her nails and into the folds of her clothes, and she had wondered why the British children in her storybooks were always excited about going to the beach - just as now she wondered why the light from the lighthouse seemed to be coming from the landward side of the expressway. "I thought a lighthouse is out at sea. — Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

I thought about Cassidy, and how she pronounced "vitamin" the British way and hated when people took too many napkins in restaurants. — Robyn Schneider

The UK had plenty of people in their country just like we have here who had the same attitudes about immigration that you find on the American left and the Democrat Party here. That the Brits, because of colonialism and because the British Empire had been so unfair to people all over the world it was time to pay the price. And you had liberals who thought that all of this was making a grand diverse society and population which would improve things in the UK. — Rush Limbaugh

The great British Library
an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or pure English, undefiled wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought. — Washington Irving

Do you like dogs?'
'No.'
'I thought the British were great dog-lovers.'
'We think Americans love dollars, but there must be exceptions. — Graham Greene

Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality. — Rupert Murdoch

Caring means cultivating the skills of an active listener. That is easier said than done, as an anecdote about the extraordinary social skills of British politicianBenjamin Disraeli and his rival William Gladstone illustrates ... The rivalry between the two statesmen piqued the curiosity of American Jennie Jerome, admired beauty and the mother of Winston Churchill. Ms. Jerome arranged to dine with Gladstone and then with Disraeli, on consecutive evenings. Afterward, she described the difference between the two men this way: "When I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman. — Marian Deegan

I came back and in '63, I was at the British Open, trying to win my first British Open. And I had what I thought was a two-shot lead with two holes to play at Lytham. I remember it like it was yesterday. Anybody with a proper brain would have played the ball short of the hole. I didn't have a proper brain at the time. But you have to make that mistake to learn it. — Jack Nicklaus

Suddenly ... a sound ... the strangest, undoubtedly, that these lonely cliffs of France had ever heard, broke the silent solemnity of the shore. So strange a sound was it that the gentle breeze ceased to murmur, the tiny pebbles to roll down the steep incline! So strange, that Marguerite, wearied, overwrought as she was, thought that the beneficial unconsciousness of the approach of death was playing her half-sleeping senses a weird and elusive trick. It was the sound of a good, solid, absolutely British Damn! — Emmuska Orczy

He takes two tea bags in a four-ounce cup and he doesn't mince words: when a pair of earnest British journalists once asked him how he thought the tigers could be saved, his answer, "AIDS," caught them off guard.
"But don't you care about people?" one of them asked.
"Not really," he replied. "Especially not the Chinese. — John Vaillant

Yes, I won the Bafta. I thought the British were very intelligent. — Eli Wallach

You cannot imagine, to give you another example, that you may have, one day, a prime minister (it would go against my modesty to breathe his name) who, one day, after announcing in Parliament, in a cool, impassive voice, that, as the result of a number of carefully thought out diplomatic manoeuvres he has refrained from discussing before (for he is not a man of many words), he has succeeded in annexing Britain as an ordinary colony of Hungary, and that he is taking this opportunity to apprise the House of the fact; - Well, as I say, after explaining this in a cool and impassive tone, ignoring the shouting, jubilant Members who want to carry him round on their shoulders, suddenly he takes up a fencing posture and, right there, on the premier's rostrum, employing a formidable, hitherto unknown jujitsu hold, floors the Australian world wrestling champion whom the British opposition treacherously hid under the rostrum in order to assassinate the greatest European. — Frigyes Karinthy

Fanny was upset when Crittenden criticized Florence Nightingale, the celebrated British nurse of the Crimean War, saying, he thought it a very unwomanly thing for a gentle lady to go into a hospital of wounded men. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum. — Kenneth Clark

Godrot opium, he thought. But he knew that his life was inexorably tied to opium - and that without it neither The Noble House nor the British Empire could exist. — James Clavell

Charles Kiss is a legendary James Bond-style British spy. And McGrath is the young idealist who is given the task of following in his footsteps. It's a mission that forces McGrath to question everything he thought he believed in. — Peter Milligan

There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer and precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsbility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one's neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority. — Friedrich Hayek

I descend from both Philadelphia Quakers and Carolina colonists whose families were separated by the Revolutionary War. That helped give me insight into the agony of Patriots who, until the British government denied their claims, had always, like Ben Franklin himself, thought of themselves as free-born Englishmen. — Edward Rutherfurd

The biggest difference between British TV and American TV is money. But what money doesn't do on American TV, which I thought it would, is buy you time. You don't get more time. You get more toys. — David Morrissey

When in August 1793 a British delegation showed their hosts a terrestrial globe, it turned into a diplomatic incident, for the Chinese were furious to see that their empire covered so little of it. For centuries the Chinese had thought of themselves as 'The Middle Kingdom', that is the centre of the civilized world. To see otherwise was a shock. — Margaret Thatcher

We all sat there laughing and sipping tea peacefully, an infidel and representatives from three warring sects of Islam. And I thought if we can get along this well, we can accomplish anything. The British policy was 'divide and conquer.' But I say 'unite and conquer. — Greg Mortenson

The FN P-35 was known more commonly as the Browning Hi-Power, a popular enough firearm to those who used it, and in and of itself, nothing more needed to be noted. Except the fact that the Browning was the sidearm of choice for the Special Air Service, and while the gun itself was produced by Fabrique Nationale, a Belgian concern, and named after an American gunmaker--John M. Browning--there were many who thought of the weapon as Very British Indeed. — Greg Rucka

There seemed never to be a moment when he was not haunted by the fear of being thought lacking by his British colleagues. And yet it seemed to be universally agreed that he was one of the most successful Indians of his generation, a model for his countrymen. Did this mean that one day all of India would become a shadow of what he had been? Millions of people trying to live their lives in conformity with incomprehensible rules? Better to be what Dolly had been: a woman who had no illusions about the nature of her condition; a prisoner who knew the exact dimensions of her cage and could look for contentment within those confines. — Amitav Ghosh

Angeline's been hanging out with that dhampir. I just saw them walking off together. Is something going on with them?"
"Which dhampir?" I asked.
"The one with the fake British accent."
"I don't think it's fake."
"Well, whatever." Even I could read the jealousy in Trey's features. "What's up with them?"
"Pretty sure there's nothing."
"Then why are they always together?"
Because she's trying to get over you, I thought. — Richelle Mead

I didn't know he was dead; I thought he was British. — Woody Allen

In the past, people couldn't place me. They thought that I was Danish or English or French. They never got that I am Italian. I'm not typical, maybe because my visual education was very mixed. There was a lot of London in my aesthetic: The Face, i-D, British music, and a lot of British fashion ... But I really enjoy this contrast. — Italo Zucchelli

We shall divert through our own Country a branch of commerce which the European States have thought worthy of the most important struggles and sacrifices, and in the event of peace on terms which have been contemplated by some powers we shall form to the American union a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of liberty an extensive and fertile Country thereby converting dangerous Enemies into valuable friends. — Thomas Jefferson

Kershaw had long ago realised, apparently, that dealing with Brits was tricky. You had to listen to what a Brit was saying
which was invariably that he thought XYZ was a terrific idea and he hoped it went very well for you
while at the same time paying heed to the greasy, nauseous suspicion you had that, although every word and phrase indicated approval, somehow the sum of the whole was that you'd have to be a mental pygmy to come up with this plan and a complete fucking idiot to pursue it. — Nick Harkaway

Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make 257 dollars on every (black slave) in a year, and spend only 12 or 13 dollars on his keep. — Howard Zinn

I must have just dreamed that about Liverpool playing 3-4-3. What do people think that was, a bit of luck? A British coach playing 3-4-3? A foreign coach doing that would be a tactical genius. I imagine people think I fell into that system through a stroke of luck or something ... it took some thought. I didn't just throw them out there. — Brendan Rodgers

Further, not only the United States, but the French, British, Germans and the United Nations all thought Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction before the United States intervened. — Jim Gerlach

He thought to himself now that if ever he went into the brewing business his posters would have written across the top "Bowen's Beer", and then underneath that in the middle a picture of Mrs. Knowles driniking a lot of it and falling about, and then across the bottom in bold or salient lettering the words "Makes You Drunk". — Kingsley Amis