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“I don't really know; I'm not in the Operations Room, you see. All I do know is that the world has a Chief who was victorious when the powers of darkness struck at Him with everything they had. He has the plans today. The darkness won't last forever. There's a splendor beyond.
~Flying Officer George Dymory Ingleford, Enemy Brothers”
― Constance Savery, Enemy Brothers

“Jane, who is much better at reading guide books than I am (I always read them on the way back to see what I missed, it’s often quite a shock), discovered something wonderful in the book she was reading. Did I know, she asked, that Brisbane was originally founded as a penal colony for convicts who committed new offences after they had arrived in Australia ? I spent a good half hour enjoying this single piece of information. It was wonderful. There we British sat, poor grey sodden creatures, huddling under our grey northern sky that seeped like a rancid dish cloth, busy sending those we wished to punish most severely to sit in bright sunlight on the coast of the Tasman Sea at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and maybe do some surfing too. No wonder the Australians have a particular kind of smile that they reserve exclusively for use on the British.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.”
― Arthur Wellesley

“Like most cities, London could be a lonely place...”
― Kassandra Cross, Sex with the CEO

“The old men were still running the country. The politicians who had caused millions of deaths were now celebrating, as if they had done something wonderful.”
― Ken Follett, Fall of Giants

“All we can infer (from the archaeological shards dug up in Berkshire, Devon and Yorkshire) is that the first Britons, whoever they were and however they came, arrived from elsewhere.
The land (Britain) was once utterly uninhibited. Then people came.”
― Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain

“A case could be made, in fact, that the English were the first victims of the British empire: without their conquest, that empire could not have been built.”
― Paul Kingsnorth

“We had deluded ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to defend themselves with paper tools. Meanwhile we glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply. But now this gloss had gone from me. Chargeable against my conceit were the causeless, ineffectual deaths of Hesa. My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.”
― T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph

“The process of industrialization is necessarily painful. It must involve the erosion of traditional patterns of life. But it was carried through with exceptional violence in Britain. It was unrelieved by any sense of national participation in communal effort, such as is found in countries undergoing a national revolution. Its ideology was that of the masters alone. Its messianic prophet was Dr Andrew Ure, who saw the factory system as ‘the great minister of civilization to the terraqueous globeâ€�, diffusing ‘the life-blood of science and religion to myriadsâ€� still lying “in the region and shadow of deathâ€�.â€� But those who served it did not feel this to be so, any more than those ‘myriadsâ€� who were served. The experience of immiseration came upon them in a hundred different forms; for the field labourer, the loss of his common rights and the vestiges of village democracy; for the artisan, the loss of his craftsman’s status; for the weaver, the loss of livelihood and of independence; for the child, the loss of work and play in the home; for many groups of workers whose real earnings improved, the loss of security, leisure and the deterioration of the urban environment.”
― E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class

“And I will go on criticising Socialism, and opposing Socialism because it is bad for Britain (...) It’s the Labour Government that have brought us record peace-time taxation. They’ve got the usual Socialist disease â€� they’ve run out of other people’s money.”
― Margaret Thatcher

“He had spent much of his childhood perched on the coast, with the taste of salt in the air: this was a place of woodland and river, mysterious and secretive in a different way from St. Mawes, the little town with its long smuggling history, where colorful houses tumbled down to the beach.”
― Robert Galbraith, Career of Evil

“Aristotle affirms that philosophy did not pass from Greece to Gaul, that is to the Druids, but was received from them.”
― John Daniel, The Philosophy of Ancient Britain

“In the spring of 1990 I flew to Aspen, Colorado, to cover a summit meeting between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George Herbert Walker Bush. This fairly routine political event took on sudden significance when, on the evening before the talks were scheduled to begin, Saddam Hussein announced that the independent state of Kuwait had, by virtue of a massive deployment of military force, become a part of Iraq. We were not to know that this act—and the name Saddam Hussein—would dominate international politics for the next decade and more, but it was still possible to witness something extraordinary: the sight of Mrs. Thatcher publicly inserting quantities of lead into George Bush’s pencil. The spattering quill of a Ralph Steadman would be necessary to do justice to such a macabre yet impressive scene.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson

“There was something indomitable about Maria â€� like Britannia. He’d heard that she kept her head during a Chilean earthquake the year before when men of greater age and experience had panicked. Afterwards she was discovered calmly taking notes, recording the way the land hand risen, for publication, she said.”
― Sara Sheridan, On Starlit Seas

“Today, the real England sometimes feels like 50 million people driving around a motorway forever.”
― Paul Kingsnorth

“But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from its taps, it is said, has passed six times through the kidneys of another, and every scrap of its land has been trodden on, fought over, dug up and broken down for centuries.”
― Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds

“The principle victims of British policies are Unpeople—those whose lives are deemed worthless, expendable in the pursuit of power and commercial gain. They are the modern equivalent of the ‘savagesâ€� of colonial days, who could be mown down by British guns in virtual secrecy, or else in circumstances where the perpetrators were hailed as the upholders of civilisation.”
― Mark Curtis, Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses

“You cannot imagine, to give you another example, that you may have, one day, a prime minister (it would go against my modesty to breathe his name) who, one day, after announcing in Parliament, in a cool, impassive voice, that, as the result of a number of carefully thought out diplomatic manoeuvres he has refrained from discussing before (for he is not a man of many words), he has succeeded in annexing Britain as an ordinary colony of Hungary, and that he is taking this opportunity to apprise the House of the fact; - Well, as I say, after explaining this in a cool and impassive tone, ignoring the shouting, jubilant Members who want to carry him round on their shoulders, suddenly he takes up a fencing posture and, right there, on the premier's rostrum, employing a formidable, hitherto unknown jujitsu hold, floors the Australian world wrestling champion whom the British opposition treacherously hid under the rostrum in order to assassinate the greatest European.”
― Frigyes Karinthy, Please Sir!

“Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.”
― Sara Sheridan, British Bulldog

“The trouble with the English was that they were English: damn cold fish! - Living underwater most of the year, in days the colour of night!”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“As a nation the people of this lovely island called Britain, are at the point where even one honest politician could give us a collective and conceptual nervous breakdown.”
― Steve Merrick

“In our day, we thought that the bards would sing of us for generations to come, but we did not believe it. But in fact Arthur now occupies a higher throne than he ever did when he was alive. The fragments of all our lives have been put together to form legend. Camelot has become the nursery of Britain: the glorious past that never was and always will be.”
― Clara Winter

“Upstairs on a bus! It’s Unbelievable”
― Diane Samuels, Kindertransport: A Drama

“The first draft doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to be written!”
― Heather Robinson, Wall of Stone

“We now reflexly, and dishonestly, unmask all virtue as hypocritical, all beauty as Kitsch; and have become so jaded with simplicity and wholesomeness that we find Good insipid and crave the sharp stimulus of sin.”
― Bruce G. Charlton, Addicted to Distraction: Psychological consequences of the modern Mass Media

“Other unsolved murders or untimely deaths were readily blamed on the supposedly sinister Jews: If a Jewish doctor failed to save a life, the whole Jewish community might be attacked and fined.”
― Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain

“He noticed that he felt calmer now she was here, still in that grey dress with her dowdy hat, the air around her redolent with orchid oil. Perhaps all women in England had this effect. Perhaps they all smelled of flowers and exuded a calm and measured purpose. He couldn’t remember.”
― Sara Sheridan, On Starlit Seas

“It is important to demonstrate to the unfree world that one of the privileges of democracies is to enjoy freedom of travel and intercourse and the exchange of knowledge and ideas. [Gerald Barry, from article in English Speaking World, 1950.]”
― Harriet Atkinson, The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People

“I’ll tell you the difference between our countries. Americans think life is serious but not hopeless; the English that life is hopeless but not serious.”
― Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds

“It’s so easy to believe that others deserve their fate, and the fact was that if nobody bothered to help other people then the worst would always happenâ€� She stares out of her window at the busy street, where the British go about their daily business, taking it for granted that they will never be arrested for not voting the right way, praying the right way, dressing the right way or for belonging to a different tribe.”
― Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds