45 Iconic British Quotes

British culture has long been a rich tapestry of history, humor, and wisdom, woven together through centuries of social and political evolution. At its heart lies a wealth of iconic quotes that capture the very essence of British wit and wisdom. From the poignant reflections of literary giants to the cheeky quips of beloved comedians, these sayings have transcended time, offering insight, inspiration, and a touch of humor. In this collection, we delve into some of the most memorable and impactful quotes that continue to resonate, revealing the unique spirit and perspective of Britain through its own words. Whether you're an aficionado of British culture or a curious newcomer, these lines promise to enlighten and entertain.

1. “Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?” - Douglas Adams

2. “Bicky rocked, like a jelly in a high wind.” - P.G. Wodehouse

3. “If they wanted their shit stirred, then stirred their shit was jolly well going to be.” - Stephen Clarke

4. “Agatha Christie n. A silent, putrid fart committed by someone in this very room, and only one person knows whodunnit.” - VIZ

5. “corgi 1. n. A high class hound, such as those that accompany the Queen. 2. n. A high class hound, such as the one that accompanies Prince Charles.” - VIZ

6. “We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.” - Ruth Rendell

7. “There were people who believed their opportunities to live a fulfilled life were hampered by the number of Asians in England, by the existance of a royal family, by the volume of traffic that passed by their house, by the malice of trade unions, by the power of callous employers, by the refusal of the health service to take their condition seriously, by communism, by capitalism, by atheism, by anything, in fact, but their own futile, weak-minded failure to get a fucking grip.” - Stephen Fry

8. “...But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.” - Winston Churchill

9. “Then one woman looked directly at her husband. "Is our place gone?" "I'm afraid so, girl," he said. "There isn't much left up there. But we're alive. We're all lucky to be alive. We'd have been dead if we'd stayed up above." "Oh, what a mercy we didn't!" she exclaimed. "How lucky we are!" Incredible though it sounds, within a few moments, a whole lot of people were congratulating each other on their extraordinary good fortune in only having lost all their worldy posessions.” - Ida Cook

10. “My mind may be American but my heart is British.” - T. S. Eliot

11. “The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.” - W. Somerset Maugham

12. “As I railed on and on, I became increasingly energied and excited by my own misery and misanthropy until I reached a kind of orgasm of negativity.'... The Brits don't merely enjoy misery, they get off on it.” - Eric Weiner

13. “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.” - Winston S. Churchill

14. “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.” - Quentin Crisp

15. “some trillions of years ago a sloppy, dirty giant flicked grease from his fingers. One of those gobs of grease is our universe on its way to the floor. Splat!” - Brion Gysin

16. “Man is a bad animal....” - Brion Gysin

17. “His face was the sort of British face from which emotion has been so carefully banished that a foreigner is apt to think the wearer of the face incapable of any sort of feeling; the kind of face which, if it has any expression at all, expresses principally the resolution to go through the world decorously, without intruding upon or annoying anyone.” - Edward Lucas White

18. “This week, Zuma was quoted as saying, 'When the British came to our country, they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way.' But the serious critique of Zuma is not about who is a barbarian and who is civilised. It is about good governance, and this is a universal value, as relevant to an African village as it is to Westminster. If you are unable to keep your appetites in check, you are inevitably going to live beyond your means. And this means you are going to become vulnerable to patronage and even corruption. That is why Jacob Zuma's 'polygamy' is his achilles heel.” - Mark Gevisser

19. “It is sometimes said that butlers only truly exist in England. Other countries, whatever title is actually used, have only manservants. I tend to believe this is true. Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race are capable of. Continentals - and by and large the Celts, as you will no doubt agree - are as a rule unable to control themselves in moments of a strong emotion, and are thus unable to maintain a professional demeanour other than in the least challenging of situations. If I may return to my earlier metaphor - you will excuse my putting it so coarsely - they are like a man who will, at the slightest provocation, tear off his suit and his shirt and run about screaming. In a word, "dignity" is beyond such persons. We English have an important advantage over foreigners in this respect and it is for this reason that when you think of a great butler, he is bound, almost by definition, to be an Englishman.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

20. “Am I bothered? Am I bothered though. I ain't doing nothing cause I ain't bothered.” - Catherine Tate

21. “The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.” - Shashi Tharoor

22. “I can smell the smoke now. I can see tendrils of it comin' up between the cracks in the shrikin' floorboards. There she is, calmly taking down the framed examples of fine embroideries, samplers, and needlework from teh hallway wall and tucking them under her arm. "Mistress! Come on! You've got to leave!"She calmly turns and faces me. "Why?" she asks. "The British are coming?""Only one, Mistress," I say” - L.A. Meyer

23. “Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)’ Humbly to expressA penitential loneliness.” - Thomas De Quincey

24. “Amazing what the British do with language; the nuances of politeness. The world's great diplomats, surely.” - Anne Rice

25. “The Times is a paper which is seldom found in any hands but those of the highly educated.” - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

26. “True the greater part of the Irish people was close to starvation. The numbers of weakened people dying from disease were rising. So few potatoes had been planted that, even if they escaped bight, they would not be enough to feed the poor folk who relied upon them. More and more of those small tenants and cottagers, besides, were being forced off the land and into a condition of helpless destitution. Ireland, that is to say, was a country utterly prostrated. Yet the Famine came to an end. And how was this wonderful thing accomplished? Why, in the simplest way imaginable. The famine was legislated out of existence. It had to be. The Whigs were facing a General Election.” - Edward Rutherfurd

27. “Yes here's to the founding fathers—slave-owners, British citizens who didn't want to pay taxes...” - David Mazzucchelli

28. “The advantages of a hereditary Monarchy are self-evident. Without some such method of prescriptive, immediate and automatic succession, an interregnum intervenes, rival claimants arise, continuity is interrupted and the magic lost. Even when Parliament had secured control of taxation and therefore of government; even when the menace of dynastic conflicts had receded in to the coloured past; even when kingship had ceased to be transcendental and had become one of many alternative institutional forms; the principle of hereditary Monarchy continued to furnish the State with certain specific and inimitable advantages.Apart from the imponderable, but deeply important, sentiments and affections which congregate around an ancient and legitimate Royal Family, a hereditary Monarch acquires sovereignty by processes which are wholly different from those by which a dictator seizes, or a President is granted, the headship of the State. The King personifies both the past history and the present identity of the Nation as a whole. Consecrated as he is to the service of his peoples, he possesses a religious sanction and is regarded as someone set apart from ordinary mortals. In an epoch of change, he remains the symbol of continuity; in a phase of disintegration, the element of cohesion; in times of mutability, the emblem of permanence. Governments come and go, politicians rise and fall: the Crown is always there. A legitimate Monarch moreover has no need to justify his existence, since he is there by natural right. He is not impelled as usurpers and dictators are impelled, either to mesmerise his people by a succession of dramatic triumphs, or to secure their acquiescence by internal terrorism or by the invention of external dangers. The appeal of hereditary Monarchy is to stability rather than to change, to continuity rather than to experiment, to custom rather than to novelty, to safety rather than to adventure.The Monarch, above all, is neutral. Whatever may be his personal prejudices or affections, he is bound to remain detached from all political parties and to preserve in his own person the equilibrium of the realm. An elected President – whether, as under some constitutions, he be no more than a representative functionary, or whether, as under other constitutions, he be the chief executive – can never inspire the same sense of absolute neutrality. However impartial he may strive to become, he must always remain the prisoner of his own partisan past; he is accompanied by friends and supporters whom he may seek to reward, or faced by former antagonists who will regard him with distrust. He cannot, to an equal extent, serve as the fly-wheel of the State.” - Harold Nicholson

29. “Sind sie vorbestraft? Du lieber Himmel ich wußte gar nicht, dass das immer noch nötig ist." Britischer Witz über die Einreise nach Australien” - Eric Idle

30. “I, Rooster John Byron, hereby place a curseUpon the Kennet and Avon Council,May they wander the land for ever,Never sleep twice in the same bed,Never drink water from the same well,And never cross the same river twice in a year.He who steps in my blood, may it stick to themLike hot oil. May it scorch them for life,And may the heat dry up their souls,And may they be filled with the melancholyWine won't shift. And all their newborn babiesBe born mangled, with the same marks,The same wounds of their fathers.Any uniform which brushes a single leaf of this woodIs cursed, and he who wears it this St George's Day,May he not see the next.” - Jez Butterworth

31. “Henry Denton: You Brits really don't have a sense of humor do you?Elsie: We do if something's funny, sir.” - Julian Fellowes

32. “Morris Weissman [on the phone, discussing casting for his movie]: "What about Claudette Colbert? She's British, isn't she? She sounds British. Is she, like, affected or is she British?” - Julian Fellowes

33. “Yer a good lad, Atticus, mowin’ me lawn and killin’ what Brits come around.” - Kevin Hearne

34. “If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.” - Helene Hanff

35. “I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British.” - John le Carré

36. “... instead of trying to grapple with the implications of the story of empire, the British seem to have decided just to ignore it... the most corrosive part of this amnesia is a sense that because the nation is not what it was, it can never be anything again.” - Jeremy Paxman

37. “Statistics show that the nature of English crime is reverting to its oldest habits. In a country where so many desire status and wealth, petty annoyances can spark disproportionately violent behaviour. We become frustrated because we feel powerless, invisible, unheard. We crave celebrity, but that’s not easy to come by, so we settle for notoriety. Envy and bitterness drive a new breed of lawbreakers, replacing the old motives of poverty and the need for escape. But how do you solve crimes which no longer have traditional motives?” - Christopher Fowler

38. “Fo' shiz.” - Stephanie Perkins

39. “But, of course, you might be asking yourself, 'Am I a feminist? I might not be. I don't know! I still don't know what it is! I'm too knackered and confused to work it out. That curtain pole really still isn't up! I don't have time to work out if I am a women's libber! There seems to be a lot to it. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?'I understand. So here is the quick way of working out if you're a feminist. Put your hand in your pants.a) Do you have a vagina? andb) Do you want to be in charge of it?If you said 'yes' to both, then congratulations! You're a feminist.” - Caitlin Moran

40. “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

41. “1lb beefstak, with1pt bitter beerevery 6 hours.1 ten-mile walk every morning.1 bed at 11 sharp every night.And don't stuff your head with things you don't understand.” - Jerome K. Jerome

42. “Then, slowly, like the sunrise peeking over the horizon, she smiled.She snapped the box closed.She didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She didn’t faint.There might have been a little crying.But mostly… she danced.” - Cora Carmack

43. “More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is." (We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless, nonelective institution. It is an arresting fact of British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted status because he is the residue of an illicit coupling 300 years before between a monarch and an orange seller.)” - Bill Bryson

44. “I was tempted to tell her it was because we were British and actually had a sense of humour, but I try not to be cruel to foreigners, especially when they're that strung out.” - Ben Aaronovitch

45. “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