"The French cannot forgive
us because they owe us so much"
Refering to French animosity towards the British.
linford christie
- athlete
"We’re a nation
too you know, not just a bunch of regions."
Speaking on BBC’s Newsnight, St George’s
Day, 1998
patrick
tripp - flag-maker to the crown (1997)
"Since Mr Blair has decided
to let Scotland go its own way we in England have said 'sod you, we’ll
go our own way too, we’ll look after ourselves'. I think England
is discovering a sense of itself."
charles
de gaulle - some french bloke named after an airport (1963)
“Britain is insular, bound up by its trade,
its markets….with the most varied and often the most distant countries.
Her activity is essentially industrial, commercial, not agricultural.
She has, in all her work, very special, very original habits and traditions.
In short, the nature, structure, circumstances, peculiar to Britain are
different from those of the other continentals… How can Britain,
being what she is, come into our system?
hugh
macdiarmid (1892- 1978) - scottish nationalist, poet and essayist
“The extraordinary
consensus of opinion [in Scotland] against the English on the score of
their greed, stupidity, their cruelty, their snobbery…is thoroughly
well-founded and arises basically from the fact that the English, like
their cousins, the Germans, have a “herren volk” tradition
and are intolerably arrogant and overbearing.
There is a silly disposition
in many quarters to attribute and such complaint to an inferiority complex…I
believe the English are finished as a world power and must be forced back
upon their own right little, tight little island, or rather that part
of it which is their own…Surely there is no need to slobber kisses
on the feet that are trampling us down. We have nothing to be grateful
for to the English…The leopard does not change his spots. The English
are as they have always been."
a. l. rowse - author
“The English….are lazy, constitutionally
indolent. They are always being caught lagging behind, unprepared –
again and again in their history it has been the same; and then, when
up against it – they more than make up for lost time by their resourcefulness,
their inventiveness, their ability to extemporise, their self-reliance.”
Taken from his book "The English Spirit"
hesketh
pearson
“Our true Patron Saint is not St George but
Sir John Falstaff….we are the most civilised people in the world,
the reason being that we are the most humorous people in the world”
The English Genius, 1939
excerpt
from 'the listener' (1939)
“Bravery of the devil-may-care variety is not
peculiar to the English. Where we differ from other peoples is in our
natural capacity for laughing at ourselves. The patriotic employer who
embellished the firm’s air-raid shelter with a placard saying “God
Save The King – and us” was expressing a typically English
attitude to life.
And this is an attitude that in the days to come
will stand us in good stead. Whatever other noises will assail our ears,
it is safe to predict that the sound of English laughter will not cease
to echo around the world”
walter
schellenberg - ss general (1940)
“It would be wrong to underestimate the enemy…
The English national character has a flaw of putting tradition above all,
retaining for as long as possible what might have been right some decades
before. But it is possible that in an emergency the British would be capable
of letting everything go and becoming surprisingly modern…The British
are capable of a complete transformation when thinking that their country
is in imminent danger, and ...they are at their most formidable in that
situation”.
an
english seaman
“ I never set eyes on him [Nelson], for which
I am both sorry and glad, for to be sure I should like to have seen him,
but then, all the men in our ship who have seen him are such soft toads,
they have done nothing but blast their eyes and cry ever since he was
killed. God bless you! Chaps that fought like the devil sit down and cry
like a wench”.
Ordinary seaman writing home after the Battle of Trafalgar.
