#britain

Britain has taken itself out as a major player in the international system, at least for a while, with the kind of cuts that they've made in their national security budget. ↗

— Robert Kagan

#budget #cuts #international #itself #kind

It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire - different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless. ↗

— Robert D. Kaplan

#cliche #days #different #empire #global

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. ↗

— Michael King

#britain #british #child #coherence #commonwealth

Unemployment is due to the large import of goods from Britain and other countries. The Government haven't used the powers which they have for the benefit of the country. ↗

— Eamon de Valera

#britain #countries #country #due #goods

I believe that Britain is becoming more class-conscious, and I quake at the very idea of Old Etonians ruling the world again. ↗

— Johnny Vegas

#becoming #believe #britain #i #i believe

I know some of my parents' friends think 'Little Britain' is in incredibly poor taste. But swimming the Channel? You can't really say anything negative about that, can you? There's nothing better than making your parents happy. The glee on my father's face that day was amazing. ↗

— David Walliams

#amazing #anything #better #britain #channel

With a diplomat father, for whom foreign postings were a fact of life, my siblings and I were expected to attend boarding schools in Britain. ↗

— Arabella Weir

#boarding #britain #diplomat #expected #fact

The US head of state grew up on food stamps. The British head of state grew up on the postage stamps. ↗

— Johann Hari

#britain #elizabeth-ii #monarchy #monarchy-of-the-uk #postage-stamps

I was a product of the times, the war, the occupation, the reoccupation, my 4 years in Britain, admiring but at the same time questioning whether they are able to do a better job than we can. ↗

— Lee Kuan Yew

#admiring #better #better job #britain #i

Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his life and in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a year, and which would, on the open market—so a doctor told me at the time—have cost a million pounds. Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of little ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor’s office, my school music lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS glasses aged 9. My NHS baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer’s title: England made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt. ....The charming tale of benign state intervention described above is now relegated to the land of fairy tales: not just naïve but actually fantastic. Having one’s own history so suddenly and abruptly made unreal is an experience of a whole generation of British people, who must now wander around like so many ancient mariners boring foreigners about how they went to university for free and could once find a National Health dentist on their high street. ↗

— Zadie Smith

#nhs #age