British Quotes - page 68
[T]hree of the most important resolutions, namely, those relating to the Most-Favoured-Nation treatment, protection against dumping or unfair competition, and the adoption of measures to render the Allies independent of enemy countries as regards essential industries, were proposed by the British delegates and passed at the Conference in the form in which they were put forward.
H. H. Asquith
The Income Tax at 6s., 5s., 4s. 6d.-I go further, and say, even at 4s.-is, in my opinion, a bad and pernicious form of capital levy... The effect of such an Income Tax...is not merely to curtail the enjoyments and comforts of a large number of our middle classes. Its effect is to dry up the stream which fertilises the whole field of employment and of industry. I should have thought that no class of the community is more directly interested in a reduction of the Income Tax to-I will not say the pre-War standard, for that is out of sight now, and an utter impossibility-but to a reasonable and moderate standard, than those people who gain their living by the work of their hands. It is not a class question at all. It affects the interests of the whole business world and the whole future of British trade.
H. H. Asquith
One day in 1926 I met him at the gate of the British Museum in his private is uniform. «Hullo, Lawrence.» «Do you recognize me?» «Of course.» Then he said, «The whole afternoon i have been walking about the Museum where every attendant used to know me, and not a single one recognized me, till I inquired about someone I missed. Then the man knew me.» Quise so - what was the good of disguising if no one recognized him?
T. E. Lawrence
As soon as the British drew them into the political process (founding of Muslim League in 1906) in order to use them as a counter-weight against the Indian National Congress, they immediately made heavy and hurtful demands on the Hindus, such as the unlimited right to slaughter cows, and they started working for political separation. First they obtained separate electorates where Muslim candidates would only have to please Muslim voters, and later they would succeed in separating a Muslim state from India. By the twenties, they took to the unscrupled use of muscle power in a big way, creating street riots and outright pogroms.
Koenraad Elst
To explain the popularity of the myth even among local Muslim writers in the 19th century, most of them say it was a deliberate British concoction, spread in the interest of the divide and rule- policy. They affirm this conspiracy scenario without anyhow citing, from the copious archives which the British administration in India has left behind, any kind of positive indication for their convenient hypothesis - let alone the rigorous proof on which a serious historian would base his assertions, especially in such controversial questions.
Koenraad Elst
Ram Swarup relates how the British had been disappointed with the conclusions of the first scholar who investigated and translated Sikh Scriptures, the German Indologist and missionary Dr. E. Trumpp, who had found Guru Nanak a 'thorough Hindu' and his religion ‘a Pantheism derived directly from Hindu sources'....So, according to Ram Swarup, other scholars were put to work to rewrite Sikh history in the sense desired by the British: ‘Max Arthur Macauliffe, a highly placed British administrator (...) told the Sikhs that Hinduism was like a 'boa constrictor of the Indian forest' which 'winds its opponent and finally causes it to disappear in its capacious interior'. The Sikhs 'may go that way', he warned. He was pained to see that the Sikhs regarded themselves as Hindus which was 'in direct opposition to the teachings of the Gurus'. Ch. 8.
Koenraad Elst
This way, Godse (born 1910) exacted ‘punishment' for Gandhi's alleged pro-Muslim policies. These were particularly his acceptance in June 1947 of the plan to partition India into a secular state, retaining the name India and a Muslim state called Pakistan; and more immediately his fast, earlier in January 1948, on behalf of the safety of the Delhi Muslims threatened by angry Hindu refugees pouring in from Pakistan, and in support of Pakistan's demand that India pay them ₹550 million as their share from the treasury of British India. Under protest, the Indian Government had given in to the latter demand because of Gandhi's pressure, and in spite of the presence of Pakistani invasion troops on Indian territory in Kashmir. Surely this was the first time in history that a country deliberately financed its battlefield opponent, and not everyone was pleased with this display of Gandhian values.
Koenraad Elst
Radio One won't play my fucking single ("What God Wants") because they know it's no good. They know it's not as good as Erasure or Janet fucking Jackson. They know that the British public shouldn't be listening to it. It makes my blood boil! If you're not 17 with a baseball hat on back to front, they don't want to know."
Roger Waters
If the Socialist Party is prepared to make friends with Russia, which is a dictatorship with which no Englishman can really agree, why can we not make friends with Italy and Germany? There are people saying Herr Hitler has broken his word. I tell you that the one bargain he has made with us, that the German Navy should be one third of the size of the British Navy, he has kept, and kept loyally.
Rab Butler
In the fifteen years following the First World War, and especially in the immediate aftermath, the industrial nations exploited this new freedom in remarkably diverse fashion. The French followed the line of least resistance with, on the whole, the best results. The British followed the line of greatest wounds. The Germans so handled matters, or so yielded to circumstances, as to produce the greatest inflation of modern times. The United States, by a combination of mismanagement and non-management, produced the greatest depression. In all the long history of money, the decade of the 1920s-extended by a few years to the consequences-is perhaps the most instructive.
John Kenneth Galbraith
We [Britain and the Dominions] stand on an equality, and if some foreign critics are disposed to say that standing on an equality means that we are bound to separate in a short time my view is precisely the contrary. My view most strongly is that the British Empire is now a more united organism than it has ever been before, that that organism is held together far more effectually by the broad loyalties, by the common feelings and interests-in many cases, of history-and by devotion to great world ideals of peace and freedom. A common interest in loyalty, in freedom, in ideals-that is the bond of Empire. If that is not enough, nothing else is enough.
Arthur Balfour
Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours. Instead of facing that fact, you persist in trying to convert all men to your own little sect, so that you can use it against them afterwards. You are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the native religion from your neighbor's flowerbeds and plant your own in its place. You would rather let a child perish in ignorance than have it taught by a rival sectary. You can talk to me of the quintessential equality of coal merchants and British officers; and yet you can't see the quintessential equality of all the religions.
George Bernard Shaw
![[Having to negotiate new trading rules from scratch would lead to a long period of unacceptable uncertainty for British business.] Seven years of not knowing what the arrangements would be for trading with Europe... Seven years of uncertainty for businesses wanting to invest in Britain not knowing what our relationship with Britain would be. They cannot be justified. They cannot be in our national interest. We should reject that out of hand. (David Cameron)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/45/david-cameron-british-business-1003245.webp)
Sir, I believe that if the House adopts this Motion...[t]hey will say, "Here is a Power that has been formerly great in arms, whose armies have gained victories in remote regions, whose fleets have floated triumphantly over every ocean... this people are now overcome by the love of gain. They fear the expenses and the efforts which may be necessary to protect their countrymen, and they abandon a large community of British subjects at the extreme end of the globe to a set of barbarians-a set of kidnapping, murdering, poisoning barbarians." I say foreign nations would feel that England has descended from that high station which hitherto she has occupied, at the beck of some of the basest, the meanest, and the most degraded beings in the civilized world.
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
[Richard Cobden and John Bright] have run a muck against everything that the British Nation respects and values – Crown, Aristocracy, Established Church, Nobility, Gentry and Landowners. They have laboured incessantly to set class against class, and the Poor against the rich.
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
[E]very subject of a distinctly practical nature, which could be advanced by mathematical knowledge, had an interest for him... Amongst such subjects were Tides and Tidal Observations, Clockwork, and the Strains in Beams and Bridges. A certain portion of his time was also given to Lectures, generally on current astronomical questions, for he held it as his duty to popularize the science as far as lay in his power. And he... took a very active part in the discussions and business of the [Royal Astronomical] Society. He also did much work for the Royal Society and... for the British Association.
George Biddell Airy
What England has done across the centuries and in the world is recognised as immense. Although there have often been conflicts with France, Britain's glorious participation in the victory which crowned the First World War-we French, we shall always admire it. As for the role England played in the most dramatic and decisive moments of the Second World War, no one has the right to forget it. In truth, the destiny of the free world, and first of all ours and even that of the United States and Russia, depended in a large measure on the resolution, the solidity and the courage of the English people, as Churchill was able to harness them. Even at the present moment no one can contest British capacity and worth.
Charles de Gaulle
