British Quotes

“Tea! That's all I needed! Good cup of tea! Super-heated infusion of free-radicals and tannin, just the thing for healing the synapses.”
― Russell T. Davies

“Sometimes it was like Neil was from an alien planet, where people never asked for or shared anything emotional without deeply apologizing first. He assured me that he was simply British. And that we Americans, with all of our loud oversharing and need for random hugs and free admissions to people we've just met of deep, traumatic childhood wounds looks just as alien to them.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“The British have always been madly overambitious, and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground

“My flat's about half a mile away, and you know what I'd like most of all in the world? I'd like a cup of tea. Come on, let's go and put the kettle on.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer.”
― George Orwell, Fighting in Spain

“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, The Monist

“She...ran away so often, and with so many different people, that she became known to her family and friends as the Bolter....”
― Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate

“I grinned. "I'm anybody's for a cuppa and a biscuit.”
― David Stuart Davies, A Taste for Blood

“Cavendish was a great Man with extraordinary singularities—His voice was squeaking his manner nervous He was afraid of strangers & seemed when embarrassed to articulate with difficulty—He wore the costume of our grandfathers. Was enormously rich but made no use of his wealth... Cavendish lived latterly the life of a solitary, came to the Club dinner & to the Royal Society: but received nobody at his home. He was acute sagacious & profound & I think the most accomplished British Philosopher of his time.”
― Humphry Davy

“He looks like a horse in a man costume!”
― Dylan Moran

“Ah. And then you kill him."
"No," Arkwright replied patiently. "We are British. We avoid murder if we can help it.{...}”
― Rick Yancey, The Isle of Blood

“His work was so great that it cannot be compassed in a few words. His death is one of the greatest losses ever to occur to British science.

{Describing Ernest Rutherford upon his death at age 66. Thomson, then 80 years old, was once his teacher.}”
― Joseph John Thomson

“Britain: the land of embarrassment and breakfast.”
― Julian Barnes

“He looks at me, the circle, then me again. “It’s really you, right? I didn’t create some simulacrum that was inhabited by a demon? Prove it’s you. Say something only Spencer would say.”
“Like what?”
“Say something annoying.”
I think about it. “Well, you claim to be British, there’s really only one thing I can think of.”
“That being?”
I lean in close, my lips gently brushing his ear. “Soccer.”
He shoves me away. “Fuck. You. It’s foot… Yeah, it’s you.”
― Vaughn R. Demont, Community Service

“Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent.”
― Nancy Kress, Yesterday's Kin

“By now there were whole new Industrial Revolutions going on in the Low Earths; the British seemed to have the building of steam engines and railways in their genes.”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War

“There is nobody as hopelessly vulgar as a British aristocrat...”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“Naval heroes are seldom immodest, but soldiers quite often are. It is said of one gallant general that publication of his book was delayed because the printer ran out of capital I's.”
― John Colville, Man Of Valour: The Life Of Field-Marshal The Viscount Gort, VC, GCB, DSO, MVO, MC

“The Brit abroad is always the voice of caution. Persons of other cultures are known to be undisciplined, prone to leaning out of car windows and cooking with garlic.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“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, Tigerman

“The very sight of a daffodil still makes me shiver, because spring in the north of England is always so bitter.”
― Bea Davenport, In Too Deep

“As a rule the Holloywood pattern for English actors is simple. They are delighted to go, they are told there is a lot of work for them if they stick it out, they tell everyone how fabulous it is, they spend all their money - and then they come home. It seems to take from two to six years.”
― Julian Fellowes, Snobs

“I would never advise shooing away a good idea.”
― Phoebe Stone, Romeo Blue

“Who am I?" She whispered. Alex opened his mouth as if to correct her, but then he said, "You are my love.”
― Deirdre Riordan Hall, In the Desert

“I remember the very day, sometime during the first two weeks of my five-year amorous sojourn in Brutland, when I was made privy to one of the most arcane of their utterings. The time was ripe for that major epiphany, my initiation into the sacred knowledge—or should I say gnosis?—of that all-important, quintessentially Brutish slang term, the word that endless hours of scholastic education by renowned mentors, plus years of scrupulous scrutiny into scrofulous texts, had disappointingly failed to impart to me, leaving me with that deep sense of emptiness begotten by hemimathy; the time was finally ripe for me to be transported by the velvety feel of the unvoiced palato-alveolar fricative, the élan of the unpronounceable and masochistically hedonistic front open-rounded vowel, and, last but not least, the (admittedly short) ejaculatory quality of the voiced velar stop: all three of them combined together to form that miraculous lexical item, the word shag.”
― Spiros Doikas, No Sex Please, We're Brutish!: The exploits of a Greek student in Britain

“Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.”
― Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After

“When, in May, tensions reached a high point, London warned Berlin that if it attacked Czechoslovakia and the French were embroiled as well, "His Majesty's Government could not guarantee that they would not be forced by circumstances to become involved also". Ar the same time, English officials were telling their counterparts in Paris that they were "not disinterested" in Czechoslovakia's fate. I learned in the course of my own career that British diplomats are trained to write in with precision; so when a double negative is employed, the intent, usually, is not to clarify an issue but to surround it with fog.”
― Madeleine Albright, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948

“At no point during the making of this book have I inverted my penis although I did go to Blackpool which turned out to be almost as painful.”
― Matt Rudd, The English: A Field Guide

“UKIP is natural party for Eastern Europeans”
― Przemek Skwirczynski

“Naval heroes are seldom immodest, but soldiers quite often are. It is said of one gallant general that publication of his book was delayed because the printer ran out of capital I's.”
― Colville John