#britain

It's nice to watch television but it's even nicer when you've got a drink in your hand,' Gregory Ratcliffe, a Birmingham shopkeeper, told Reynolds News. 'Makes it more intimate somehow. Gives you the feeling that you're in a posh cabaret. ↗

— David Kynaston

#britain #drinking #fifties #home #television

You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth—and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere. ↗

— Boris Johnson

#cars #france #germany #intellectual-property #internet

I fall in love with Britain every day, with bridges, buses, blue skies... but it’s a brutal world, man. ↗

— Pete Doherty

#love #pete-doherty #love

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#commonwealth #duty #finest-hour #men

(On Captain Britain) "Every British person thinks he's got the same accent as them. The air around him is warm like a summer meadow. He smells of honey. I've seen grown men weep at the sight of him. ↗

— Paul Cornell

#men

Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea? ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#britain #colonialism #europe #holy-land #irony

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm. ↗

— Nick Cohen

#arabs #bigotry #britain #islam #islamism

If you lay a finger on our pirates again, I'm going to kick your ass! ↗

— Hidekaz Himaruya

#arthur-kirkland #britain #england #hetalia #hidekaz-himaruya

I would sum up the German character best by saying that they are the best of losers and the worst of winners. ↗

— Edmund Ironside

#germany #history #world-war-ii #world-war-ii

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. ↗

— Dean Acheson

#empire #found #great #great britain #lost