#britain

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

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

I remember being in China and realising how irrelevant not even Britain is, but also Europe. We're just another remote country that hardly impinges on some places at all. ↗

— Clive Anderson

#another #being #britain #china #country

At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#britain #century #countries #every #france

The U.S. and Britain are incapable of controlling all of Iraq. ↗

— Bashar al-Assad

#controlling #incapable #iraq

Britain, however, has ended up specialising in the ones you don't see as much of: defence aerospace, making drive shafts for cars, pills and drugs, designing chips that go into 94 per cent of the world's mobile phones. And so there's a danger that because it doesn't have a British flag on it, people won't realise that we actually do produce value. ↗

— Evan Davis

#aerospace #because #britain #british #cars

Phyllis is one of the tunnel boring machines for Crossrail and one of the most extraordinary characters I met, visiting some of the most exciting infrastructure in Britain. Crossrail is the new railway which will run from West to East right across London. It is the biggest engineering project in Europe - and Phyllis herself is not exactly dainty. ↗

— Evan Davis

#biggest #boring #britain #characters #dainty

But I am an optimist about Britain; and the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is not that the optimist believes the world is wonderful and the pessimist believes it's beset by challenges; the difference is the pessimist believes we will be defeated by them; the optimist thinks the challenges can be overcome. ↗

— Tony Blair

#am #believes #beset #between #britain

We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world. ↗

— Tony Blair

#american #britain #driven #evil #friends