#britain

The political health of Britain has deteriorated very sharply. The Conservative Party must do something about it. I am the man to do it. ↗

— Kenneth Clarke

#am #britain #conservative #conservative party #deteriorated

In Britain, girls seem to be either bright or attractive. In America, that's not the case. They're both. ↗

— John Cleese

#attractive #both #bright #britain #case

Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me - but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn't. ↗

— Jonathan Coe

#bit #britain #contemporary #endlessly #fascinating

I live a perfectly happy and comfortable life in Blair's Britain, but I can't work up much affection for the culture we've created for ourselves: it's too cynical, too knowing, too ironic, too empty of real value and meaning. ↗

— Jonathan Coe

#blair #britain #comfortable #comfortable life #created

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners. ↗

— Eric J. Hobsbawm

#capitalism #economics #education #london #morality

When I was a child in the 1940s and early 1950s, my parents and grandparents spoke of Britain as home, and New Zealand had this strong sense of identity and coherence as being part of the commonwealth and a the identity of its people as being British. ↗

— Michael King

#britain #british #child #coherence #commonwealth

When I came back to Britain, I realized that I was no longer a very young woman. I had to meet my new consciousness, my new age, with roles that reflected it somewhat. ↗

— Julie Christie

#back #britain #came #consciousness #had

The British system had requirements, including Latin. I'm not positive you ever had to know Greek, but there are certainly kinds of curricula where you had to know Greek too. I think in Britain there was the most mindless, repetitive sort of learning. ↗

— William Scott

#british #certainly #ever #greek #had

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