Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best British Quotes from famous persons: John Lydon, Arthur Eddington, Hari Kunzru, Damon Hill, Fergus Henderson. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the British Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.
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One of the most beautiful things about Britain, apart from the NHS and the free education, is the British Army.
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I do have a fundamental concern about us losing control of our own destiny, and this is not just about the euro. You can expand and extend it into the whole constitutional issue. The British people have been suckered with regard to how the whole currency and constitutional issues have been sold to them.
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Looking out over the port of Dover, with the endless steam of boats coming in and out, every British citizen is reminded that belonging here has never been about blood or genes. It’s simply about being at home on this discrete island and being aware of the privileges and responsibilities that brings.
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If the British Fleet were lost or captured, the Atlantic might be dominated by Germany, a power hostile to our way of life, controlling in that event most of the ships and shipbuilding facilities of Europe.
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I think at its best the American sense of humor is the same as the British sense of humor at its best, which is to be wry and ironic and self deprecating.
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You don’t expect to get the letter saying, Her Majesty would like to appoint you Knight Commander of the British Empire! It was just a completely overwhelming and exciting day.
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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.
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The colour of a British wood in autumn is predominantly yellow. There are relatively few European trees which have red leaves in the autumn. But there are splashes of crimson or rust-red colours from a few indigenous trees, like the rowan, as well as from introduced species, like the North American red oak.
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I’m quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early ’90s, which I based on the early seasons of ‘Cops‘ and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British ‘Big Brother‘.
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The British media is sinking down, as the American news media has lowered the bar for all of humanity. British news media is definitely trying to stoop down to that level. Everyone is stooping to the lowest common denominator.
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There is certainly a higher percentage of wit in British comedy than in American comedy. What always tickles me is the way in which people try to use their intellect to get themselves out of tricky situations but never quite manage to do so – much to their enormous embarrassment.
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The United States can tell you all about what’s wrong with the British, to say nothing of the Russians.
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I’m a big fan of British journalists like ‘The Independent’s Robert Fisk, but it’s hard to find voices like his in the U.S.
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The British were white, English, and Protestant, just as we were. They had to have some other basis on which to justify independence, and happily they were able to formulate the inalienable truths set forth in the Declaration.
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I’m British; pessimism is my wheelhouse.
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No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
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From infancy, I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.
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The only difference between the Bel Air of the ’90s and the Bel Air of my childhood is that now the nannies are Latina instead of British, and the cars European instead of American.
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The British public like a Briton with personality, someone who comes out on court and isn’t dour and down on themselves.
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The English country house is certainly an icon of British culture.
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I would wish for more British involvement in Europe, not less.
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There is an honourable tradition in British public life that those charged with authority at the top of an organisation should accept responsibility for what happens in that organisation. I am therefore writing to the prime minister today to tender my resignation as chairman of the BBC.
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In my job I meet many outstanding, world class, British based companies. But we need more companies and more jobs in the companies we have.
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Nova Scotia as a British colony also came into being as another result of these adventurous British expeditions to North America in the reign of James I.
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I live in L.A. so I worry my kids aren’t that connected to Britain, I suppose I don’t want them to become American kids. We try to get back three or four times a year. When they go to school they speak with a British-American accent but when they come home to us they go back to their British accent.
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I’m free to see things objectively because I don’t consider myself American, and I don’t consider myself British or Indian. I’m kind of an amalgam or mongrel of a lot of different places and experiences. In a lot of ways it’s been a good thing for me. It’s enabled me to do what I do on ‘The Daily Show.’
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Americans enjoy uniformity in a way that the British don’t; they wanted everybody of a sort of nice chorus line height and here I was, this person who was a good three inches taller than anyone else on the end of the line.
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I think, British food, it’s had a bad rap.
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When I was in high school, I looked for the black presence in a British historical tradition – before too much slavery and empire – that would not cost me my self-respect.
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In dealing with the China problem, the British and American side, which had particularly strong interests in China, should have based its judgments about the origins of the problem on direct observation of the actual circumstances at the time.
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Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores.
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The International Brigades and the British volunteers were, numerically, only a small part of the Republican forces, but nearly all had accepted the need for organization and order in civilian life.
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I’ve always felt, with ‘The Iliad,’ a real frustration that it’s read wrong. That it’s turned into this public school poem, which I don’t think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes – it’s become a cliched, British empire part of our culture.
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As Trade Secretary I see the world is waiting. The Australians, the Americans, the Kiwis, the Japanese – they all want us to get Brexit done so that we can begin negotiations and forge new relationships that will open up new markets for British businesses, create jobs and attract new investment.
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I still read the British papers, but I’ve never been a Royalist, ever. It’s funny, there always seems to be much more of a fascination with the Royal Family over here then there does in England.
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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.
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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.
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I do like British guys. If I had to pick one it would be Ewan McGregor. I met him once and he was gorgeous, even if he is a little short. He has the most amazing charisma.
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Historically, the British have always been rather wary of grand engineering projects – perhaps understandably, given that many of them have been delivered late and over budget.
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I do feel a certain love from the British public.
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Well British pension funds have not been investing the savings of British people in British infrastructure.
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My old boss, former British prime minister David Cameron, thought Obama was one of the most narcissistic, self-absorbed people he’d ever dealt with.
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I love the British.
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I’m very proud to be British, and my brand is British.
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Yes, I won the Bafta. I thought the British were very intelligent.
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If there’s one thing above all that sets me apart from Tony Blair it is this – I am not embarrassed to articulate the instincts of the British people.
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It the British System is the most gigantic system of slavery the world has yet seen, and therefore it is that freedom gradually disappears from every country over which England is enabled to obtain control.
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If I didn’t forgive the people who took me into the barracks and beat me unconscious over a period of days during the period when the British state was indicted for inhuman and degrading treatment in 1971-72, or even the guys who shot me, if you don’t forgive them, you end up with unnecessary baggage.
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Pop managers are fixed in the dramatic stock character repertoire too, ever since the first British pop film musical, Wolf Mankowitz’s ‘Expresso Bongo’ of 1959, with Cliff Richard as Bongo Herbert and Laurence Harvey as his manager. The key components were cast as X parts gay, X parts Jewish and triple X opportunistic.
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Anyone that knows me knows what I’m about, and I’m very much a British actor, a European actor.
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Most Americans don’t even know that Minnie Driver is English or that Catherine Zeta Jones is Welsh, but people are reminded every time ‘ER’ is shown that I’m the British Dr. Corday.
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What’s amazing is that I’m recognized all over the world through ‘Red Dwarf.’ British fans are exceptional, but the American fans are something else. Some of them fly 500 miles to stand in line for three hours, just to meet me, then when they do they collapse. It makes you feel like a rock star!
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My grandmother on my father’s side, a nightclub singer, was a Jewish refugee from Prussia who ended up in Jerusalem, where she met my grandfather – a British army officer. I remember as a child having bowls of chicken soup made by her. There were lots of interesting components, like feet and necks.
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We have the character of an island nation: independent, forthright, passionate in defence of our sovereignty. We can no more change this British sensibility than we can drain the English Channel. And because of this sensibility, we come to the European Union with a frame of mind that is more practical than emotional.
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I like reflecting the culture I understand best, spotting the idiosyncrasies of British people and revealing them to an audience in a way that amuses is what I find fun.
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‘Notting Hill?’ Does that poke fun at being British? Maybe it does. In ‘Mickey Blue Eyes,’ that’s kind of the point: the clash of worlds, the unlikely combo of a respectable Englishman and a mob guy. If you take out the Britishness, you don’t really have much.
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I don’t enjoy British shows as a rule because British audiences are strange.
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It was part of your religion to hate the British.
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I loved working on ‘Happy Gilmore’ because I love to travel to new places and we got to go to British Columbia. Any Adam Sandler film is fun to work on because it is a reunion of the boys club of guys that have worked together in the past.
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I spent 34 months on the battleship Alabama, South Dakota-class. I was a gun captain. First we went to Russia for about 11 months with the British convoys. Then we were up in Norway and Scandinavia.
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The test of leadership for David Cameron was actually to bring the British Conservative Party back in to the mainstream.
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I am a caricature of what British science is about in the way I work.
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I believe that a large part of the training in the regional theaters is in imitation of the British style of acting. The British orientation is textual; they start from the language and work toward the character.
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The British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.
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I like everything European. Even my GPS has a British accent – it’s way less annoying than the American one.
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I am now a commander of the British Empire.
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British-built railways in India helped the British to make money and maintain order; but, as a by-product, they served to unite the country, making it ripe for independence.
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My first book, ‘Fast Forward’, was about growing up in the shadow of Hollywood and how kids are affected by the culture of materialism and the cult of celebrity, and I’ve often felt the reason my work has an audience in the U.K. is because it’s everything the British love to hate about the Americans.
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I only started concentrating on football as a career when I left school at 18. I played golf for the Scottish and British boys’ teams.
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Let’s turn British inventions into British industries, British factories and British jobs. Let them make pounds for us, not dollars marks or yen for others.
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I was never too keen on the British music press. They’ve called us a supermarket hype, and they used to suggest that we didn’t write our own songs.
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The British are so funny. It’s like they can’t believe I lived in Hackney. ‘You could live in Bondi Beach. Why would you want to live in ‘Ackney?’ But Hackney’s fantastic. I’m serious. There are so many artists there. I loved the markets, the parks, the pubs, the diversity. It was a cultural melting-pot.
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As for the British churchman, he goes to church as he goes to the bathroom, with the minimum of fuss and no explanation if he can help it.
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What we learned quite early on is what was really important to early British pop that we produced-and this is where we were distinct from almost everybody else in this respect-is that it had to reflect exactly what the audience wanted us to say.
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When the weather’s good, there’s no better place to be than the British countryside.
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I am Scottish. I am also British.
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For me, as a writer who comes from quite a naturalistic tradition, British screenwriting is quite delicate, quite small, and rarified in a way.
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I think British science is becoming more like American science – and then there is everybody else, I’m afraid.
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British aren’t really known for their physical loveliness but firemen, generally speaking, are gorgeous.
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I’m proud of being British, but I think our aristocracy is overrated.
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With the issue of immigration, it’s very difficult because, although I don’t have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England, the more the British identity disappears.
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You can’t just slander someone, defame them, lie about them. You can’t incite people to crime. There’s all sorts of reasonable restrictions on free speech that are already codified in the British common-law system.
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As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don’t require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing.
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I’ve always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden’s animations.
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But we had a fantastic coach, Simon Clifford, who runs a British football youth game which teaches Brazilian techniques – which is what we wanted to incorporate into the film. And some of those things we eventually got in.
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In Great Britain the price of food is at a higher level than in any other country, and consequently, the British artisan labours at a disadvantage in proportion to the higher rate of his food.
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On banks, I make no apology for attacking spivs and gamblers who did more harm to the British economy than Bob Crow could achieve in his wildest Trotskyite fantasies, while paying themselves outrageous bonuses underwritten by the taxpayer. There is much public anger about banks and it is well deserved.
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The thinking was that so long as the British kept our basic documents in their hands and so long as they kept the formal right to change them, changes in our system would be careful and deliberate.
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I love Adele. Adele is my favorite artist. She’s British. She’s funny. She’s just an amazing, incredible voice, and I love to sing as well.
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If I go anywhere where there are people who vaguely look like me, there is always that feeling of, ‘Actually I do look quite similar to everyone else.’ At moments like that, I become very, very British. My accent gets more clipped, and I stride around as if I’ve got an empire.
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As they say, one thing led to another, and, ultimately, the British and Irish governments asked me to serve as chairman of the peace negotiations, which ironically began six years ago this week.
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As many as three million people are expected to attend the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, British Columbia. The security concerns and economic opportunities are great for both Canada and Washington state.
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The British have given me good support for the last 8 years and have always believed in me.
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The real problem at the moment is that the banks – because of their existing culture, which is frankly anti-business, obsession with short-term trading profits, not focusing on the long term – are throttling the recovery of British industry.
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We cannot, with good conscience, expect the British to set up an orderly schedule for the liberation of India before we have decided for ourselves to make all who live in America free.
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Most white Americans only discovered the blues with the British invasion.
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I loved history, particularly of the British, American and Old Testament kind.
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I’ve been really lucky because I’ve managed to become wonderful friends with a handful of very talented British designers. Christopher Kane has become one of my very good friends – also Erdem. Jonathan Saunders is another brilliant talent who’s very kind. We all hang out.
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Independence day is an interesting time to reflect on our strange fealty to institutions that the British left us, including those that were explicitly set up to be used against us.
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I have no interest in Shakespeare and all that British nonsense… I just wanted to get famous and all the rest is hogwash.
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The Irish and British, they love satire, it’s a large part of the culture.
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I love London, I love the British people.
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If the colonists hadn’t rejected British militarism and the massive financial burden of maintaining the British military, America wouldn’t exist.
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I’m a big fan of ‘The Office’, both the British and the American versions.
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I work for the British people. I do not gather intelligence so the government can lie to the British people.
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As a Business Ambassador, I am delighted to help both new and established British designers receive the recognition they deserve in the global fashion arena.
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The Cinquecento was an engine of motivation at Fiat. It refurbished the image of the entire company. It’s a symbol for the company, but it’s more than that. It’s a global Italian symbol, as Mini is a global British symbol and the Beetle is a global German symbol.
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We have had more sales for this year’s grand prix than any other, and we have been helped in that by the fact that Jenson had 10 podiums last season and looks like a winner. It is good for British motor racing if he is there and doing well.
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The British have been particularly shy about the issues of financial regulation, and attentive only to the interests of the City – hence their reluctance to see the introduction of a tax on financial transactions and tax harmonisation in Europe.
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American actors who voice animated movies are so brilliant at it, because by the nature of American speak, it’s full of energy and full of commitment. And as a British actor, we have to kind of learn that.
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I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.
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Considering that I’m British and I talk the way I do, I love it when a director takes a chance on me.
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I lived in London for eight years and I like to say that I am two parts American and one part British because I lived there for a third of my life.
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In this context the British and Irish governments will have to promote a new, imaginative and dynamic alternative in which both governments will share power in the north.
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I think I should be described as ‘bi’ – not bisexual, because I’m not – I’m gay – but ‘binational’ because I retain British nationality, and I add to it being Australian, which is like having your cake and eating it.
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By the time I came to the States, I really understood how a magazine works. I came to ‘Vogue’ as creative director, and three years later I went back to London to be editor in chief of British ‘Vogue.’
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It seems appropriate that the author of ‘1984’ was a British citizen. George Orwell must have seen how easily the great British public’s lamb-like disposition toward its leaders could be exploited to create a police state.
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The Dancing Girls of Lahore was offered to dozens of British publishers and was turned down by everyone. It is still on offer in the U.K., but I’m not confident there will be any takers.
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It’s just that to a lot of British people George Bush represents the worst of all things American. He’s the right-wing Christian crusader, the toxic Texan who refused Kyoto, the poll-cheat eel who undermined democracy on the back of something called ‘chads,’ a notion we’ve never entirely grasped.
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In the late spring of 2008, my wealthy entrepreneurial husband, Elon Musk, the father of my five young sons, filed for divorce. Six weeks later, he texted me to say he was engaged to a gorgeous British actress in her early 20s who had moved to Los Angeles to be with him.
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The first condition of success for the League of Nations is, therefore, a firm understanding between the British Empire and the United States of America and France and Italy that there will be no competitive building up of fleets or armies between them.
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I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he’s from England.
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I think there’s going to be pressure on all the British athletes. It’s a home Olympics at the end of the day. I like adrenaline, that’s something I feed off. I’m just going to go out there and do my best.
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This was the period when I used all the influence I had to get the British to abandon their export trade, and as much as possible convert all of their manufacturing facilities to the immediate needs of the war, including civilian, as well as military requirements.
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I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, ’cause I’ve got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one… now a British one. I think it’d be pretty good to have an American phrase book.
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On the Northern Ireland question, for instance, the British and Irish governments prohibit media contact with members of the IRA, but we have always gone ahead, believing in the right to information.
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There is something about Prince William and Prince Harry that brings real modernity to the British royal family. They are also very open, human, and kind, and this is what I have tried to capture in the pictures I have taken of them as well as in my pictures of Prince William and Catherine.
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The fact is that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business. It just doesn’t work and you’re going to hit a brick wall at some point.
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My mother took me to the British Museum aged five. I had thought people from the past weren’t as good as we were, and then I saw the Elgin marbles. Suddenly, the world seemed more complicated.
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As for the United States’ future in Afghanistan, it will be fire and hell and total defeat, God willing, as it was for their predecessors – the Soviets and, before them, the British.
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I read two mysteries a day when I was a kid. All of Agatha Christie, all of ‘Sherlock Holmes.’ I’ve seen every single British detective show ever made.
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The guitar influence that affected my songwriting came from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.
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It’s very hard to describe your own style. And I’m young, so I’m still experimenting. But I think it’s quite British and very much about individuality.
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I don’t know why British actors are getting big parts in American TV shows. Maybe it’s because we’re cheap.
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I work three days at home, and two days in the British Library or the London Library, just to get out of the house and hide from the children.
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The British were indeed very far superior to the Americans in every respect necessary to military operations, except the revivified courage and resolution, the result of sudden success after despair.
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I always joke that I’m a British actress trying to break into Scandinavian TV.
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You know, not even your British Queen is called just Elizabeth – she’s Elizabeth the Second. There’s only one Imelda.
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Short of being prime minister there isn’t a better job in British politics than running London.
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Not surprisingly, there is a cultural divide between American and British actors regarding the self-promotion associated with new media.
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Now undoubtedly, we face some very British challenges when it comes to infrastructure. We rightly cherish our back yards and green spaces, and we’ll defend them passionately when projects are announced. We live in a democracy, and we like to debate these things, often for many years.
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I was offered and accepted a part in ‘A Few Best Men,’ and then the Australian actor’s union argued that there were too many British actors. And the director decided to lose me.
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As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.
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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.
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I think you know that I classify science as British science, American science, and everybody else.
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Being a fan of authentic Dada, I find today’s art – what I call ‘Bankers‘ Dada’ – mind-numbingly dull. The most challenging work I’ve seen of late is by The British Art Resistance. Their document, ‘A Call for Heroes in an Age of Cowards‘, is apt in these days of witless chancers.
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The big risk to British lives in 2013 is in Afghanistan. Our troops, diplomats and aid workers have made a big contribution there. But while there is an end date for Western engagement, 2014, there isn’t a proper end game.
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The British have slang words, as we do, but it was fun.
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I can’t always be making ‘British films.’ Why should we be making films about corsets and horses and girls learning to drive when Americans send over an event movie and make five or 10 million?
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Californians don’t have that marvelous British cynicism, but then the British can be so patronizing at times.
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Well, I’m British. I’m proud to be British and I love this country. I’m going nowhere.
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Yes, U.S. travelers dress better. The British are always so conspicuous in hot climates. They don’t seem to wear shorts. American men seem to be comfortable wearing hot-weather clothing.
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Gas prices and train fares seem to be the two commodities for modern British life that base their prices on a whim, or numbers plucked out of thin air, without a thought to the real cost to those for whom those price hikes mean unimaginable sacrifices in their day to day lives.
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The American audiences are more vocal and enthusiastic. British audiences tend to sit back a little more.
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Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.
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It has been argued that British girls are incapable of deep feeling or brilliant acting owing to their lack of temperament. This, I am positive, is not true.
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The positive news is that the British economy is continuing to grow and is creating jobs. And it is positive news too that at a time of real international instability we are a safe haven in the storm.
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I’d like to film a British commercial; they’re better than American ones.
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I give no more paroles to British officers.
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There are no countries in the world less known by the British than those selfsame British Islands.
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British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.
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I have moved on from being a British parliamentarian, I have moved on from being a New Labour politician, I have moved on from being the supporter in the active day-to-day sense of Tony Blair.
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The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It’s a prurience that I’ve never understood.
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American science is much more organized, much more hierarchical than British science has been.
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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.
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At the beginning of my career, as a boy from Peru in London, suddenly discovering British culture and society, I looked so much at the work of the photographers Cecil Beaton and Norman Parkinson, which seemed to represent a wonderful vanished grandeur of my new country.
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
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Science fiction has always been a means for political comment. H.G. Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’ wasn’t about a Martian invasion – it was a critique of British colonialism, and… ‘The Time Machine’ is really an indictment of the British class system.
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You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let’s not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.
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Although I’m living in California, I’m very proud to be British.
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The British are coming. One if by land, two if by sea.
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I made a very concerted decision to go to drama school in the United States. But I did have the opportunity to go to Britain’s Central School of Speech and Drama, and my dad and I had a few tense words about that. He wanted me to go to British drama school.
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I know the British people and they are not passengers – they are drivers.
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The idea of elegance and aristocratic indulgence of an ocean cruise was born out of the image of the rich men and women who ruled the British Empire slowly sailing to India and the Far East while sipping gin and tonic on deck – served by men in white jackets.
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I am a passionate believer in freedom of speech. I would not support anything which would impinge on aggressive robust freedom of the British press, but when things go wrong and there has been outright illegality, there should be proper accountability.
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For over 30 years, the IRA showed that the British government could not rule Ireland on its own terms.
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The British ‘A Night to Remember’ is so beautifully done and so well-constructed.
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I love London and British women.
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It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color. Hollywood and British writers are not writing parts for us, or the directors are not interested in casting us in parts that are color-blind.
362
The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it’s completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.
363
Civil servants are fully aware of the challenges the British economy faces. They are, after all, working tirelessly and professionally to support the coalition government through the current challenges, every day, and in every part of Britain.
364
In 1986, I was asked by the then-Dean of Science at the University of British Columbia, Dr. R.C. Miller, Jr., to establish a new interdisciplinary institute, the Biotechnology Laboratory. I decided that it was time for me to start paying back for the thirty years of fun that I had been able to have in research.
365
My unbeaten record and the 10 British Open wins have not been equalled.
366
The modern Middle East was largely created by the British. It was they who carried the Allied war effort in the region during World War I and who, at its close, principally fashioned its peace. It was a peace presaged by the nickname given the region by covetous British leaders in wartime: ‘The Great Loot.’
367
The most conservative man in this world is the British trade unionist when you want to change him.
368
If you walk through Knightsbridge on any bland day of the week you won’t hear an English accent. You’ll hear every accent under the sun apart from the British accent.
369
When Hong Kong was under British administration, governors were dispatched from London to govern this city. We had no say in the matter.
370
In 1973 we moved to the British Isle of Man, and I put my first band together for one year, named Melody Fair.
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I received an OBE from the Queen, which probably doesn’t mean anything in America but is quite nice in England – the Order of the British Empire for services to drama.
373
The British have always made terrible parents.
374
There’s constantly this melancholy about British hip-hop. People are always waiting for it to explode like American hip-hop, but it might just be that British hip-hop will always be as it is: an underground thing which will stay that way.
375
For an event that was wholly created in the poisonous psychological warfare kitchens of the Second World War, run by the ministries of propaganda in many countries, not just by the British or the Americans, but also the Russians and undoubtedly the world Jewish organizations.
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The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.
378
I am confident that in the end freedom and democracy will prevail over terror and tyranny. We will win this war on terror – and when we do Americans, the British, Iraqis, and people around the world will be more secure.
379
American television constantly tries to co-op British comedy and create their own version of it. Most of the time it doesn’t work; obviously, in the case of ‘The Office,’ it did. But a lot of times, it doesn’t really work.
380
If these theatres didn’t exist, the tradition of British theatre would cease to exist.
381
It’s very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.
382
The British regulatory system was revised, so that bigger profits were encouraged, which removed the option of big spending on programming. Quality just fell off a cliff, and all the old hands either left or were fired for being too expensive.
383
I don’t care to analyze acting. On the other hand there is a fascination because distributors are putting out British films. You get films here with great performances you’ll never see again. Why compare. We should go after the businessmen.
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I think there’s always been a traditionally apocalyptic side to British science fiction, from H.G. Wells onwards. I mean, most of Wells’ stories are potentially apocalyptic in some sense or another.
387
In the last 15 or 20 years, I’ve watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won’t sink. I don’t know who these people are but they’re little pigs.
388
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Gandhi has asked that the British Government should walk out of India and leave the Indian people to settle differences among themselves, even if it means chaos and confusion.
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As British people, we don’t often face what our role in history is. We’re only just beginning to do that. Storytellers have an incredibly important role in confronting that and continuing the conversation.
393
At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It’s extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.
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Britain, today, educates 4.8 million primary school children in Britain. And we educate five million primary school children around the developing world, at a cost of 2.5 per cent of what we spend on British children.
396
Most correspondents came from the former colonial powers – there were British, French, and a lot of Italians, because there were a lot of Italian communities there. And of course there were a lot of Russians.
397
I grew up with British rock.
398
There’s this assumption that every British actor, they can ride horses. Definitely not!
399
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I think you will find scientists that think like you in Germany and Britain, and you will find politicians that think like Weinberger. I think the most bellicose ruling group in the Western world at the moment is the British.
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My mum is Croatian, and obviously she’s female and she’s very emotional, very hot-blooded, very touchy-feely, whereas I think my dad’s quite British.
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The British bombing of Caen beginning on D-Day in particular was stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime.
407
British media supported Hillary. No problem with that. No interference. Nothing. French media supported Hillary. No problem with that. Some Russian media supported Trump: ‘Oh my God!’
408
Could I see myself with a British boyfriend? Absolutely. The way they wear their pants is so cute. Guys don’t do it in America. Their style is cute. I just feel like Brits are honest – period. And that’s what I like.
409
I’ve had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press.
410
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The whole of government needs to contribute to the shared goal of restructuring the British economy. But that means taking on the myth that the Treasury either knows best or can run it all. It just doesn’t.
412
Only when I came to America did I think of myself as British.
413
When Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s government fell in May 1940, the nation turned to Churchill. At last, his unique qualities were brought to bear on a supreme challenge, and with his unshakable optimism, his heroic vision, and above all, his splendid speeches, Churchill roused the spirit of the British people.
414
What I hope is in five years’ time, I can go to the British people in the election and say: Lots of you doubted that coalition politics worked, but it has worked.
415
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I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I’m an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.
417
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I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother’s house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.
419
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I think that British girls have a very eclectic and unique style.
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And I was asked if I would come and help with the recovery of this great British company, Cable and Wireless, and I’m delighted to become part of the new and very talented management that have been brought in to that company as well.
424
Like, Mission Of Burma to me always sounded almost like they were part of the British Arty New Wave. I kind of like that. I like not being able to tell the difference.
425
No one could seriously dispute that almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, all of North Africa except Morocco, all of the Middle East except Israel and Jordan and most of the oil-rich states, and the entire former British Indian Empire were better governed by Europeans.
426
British and American women have very different styles and a different way of living.
427
King Louis Philippe once said to me that he attributed the great success of the British nation in political life to their talking politics after dinner.
428
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When I came to Britain I was in awe of the British press, afraid of them. But they’re not as ferocious as people think. In some instances they are, but when it comes to taking on power they’re really deferential.
431
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The country I live in is never clear about its name. My passport says ‘the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,’ and citizens of the U.K. may call themselves British, English, Scottish, Welsh or from Northern Ireland.
433
We know that the British public are obsessed with class.
434
435
I was determined that no British government should be brought down by the action of two tarts.
436
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.
437
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I think it would be a problem if Hollywood was casting British actors only as villains; if that were the case, then certainly there would be cause for concern.
440
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Why do British people make such good TV? It’s so annoying. Stop it. Is it because they have free health care? Uggh.
445
It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn’t have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.
446
447
There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.
448
The British theatre and establishment is so hard to penetrate, and there are so many talented people involved in it. So, to be counted among some of those actresses… It doesn’t get better than that.
449
Biden’s first failed run for the presidency was ended by his dishonesty over his academic record and his plagiarism, including the biography and speeches of British Labor politician Neil Kinnock.
450
Usually, certainly British singers, adopt an American accent when they sing and I think that usually people are thinking of somebody else, but I just think of very specific people.
451
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All the cliches of glamorous sophistication have little appeal to me. Do I want to live the British version of ‘Dynasty?’ No thanks!
454
It’s celebrated in British culture to be eccentric.
455
