Famous quotes containing the words british, people, irish, descent and/or britain:
“There’s nothing the British like better than a bloke who comes from nowhere, makes it, and then gets clobbered.”
—Melvyn Bragg (b. 1939)
“How to attain sufficient clarity of thought to meet the terrifying issues now facing us, before it is too late, is ... important. Of one thing I feel reasonably sure: we can’t stop to discuss whether the table has or hasn’t legs when the house is burning down over our heads. Nor do the classics per se seem to furnish the kind of education which fits people to cope with a fast-changing civilization.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)
“Genealogy. An account of one’s descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.”
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)
“When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of her land,
And guardian angels sung the strain:
Rule, Britannia! Britannia rules the waves!
Britons never shall be slaves.”
—James Thomson (1700–1748)