"British people" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a new era in polar explorations, created a tremendous sensation. Knighthood was immediately bestowed upon him by the King, while the British people heaped upon him all the honors and applause with which they have invariably crowned every explorer returning from the north with even a measure of success. In originality of plan and equipment Parry has been equaled and surpassed only by ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... occupation of India is commercial rather than political. India furnishes a most valuable market for British manufactures; it supplies the British people with a large amount of raw material for manufacture. The general government is administrative only so far as the construction of railways, irrigating canals, and harbors, and the organization of financial ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... purpose was to tell the British that they were forgetting the "God of our fathers" and putting their trust in wealth and navies and the "reeking tube and iron shard" of the cannon. The poem rang through England like a bugle call and stirred the British people more deeply than any other poem ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... forgotten; and were it not for the popular pages of Voltaire, and the shadow which a great name throws over the stream of time in spite of every neglect, he would be virtually unknown at this moment to nineteen-twentieths of the British people. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... victim to the factions which divide my country, and to the hostility of the greatest Powers of Europe, I have terminated my political career, and come, like Themistocles, to seat myself on the hearth of the British people. I put myself under the protection of their laws, which I claim from your Royal Highness as the most powerful, the most constant, and the most ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... spirit of the British people in this war has been expressed in the historic words and deeds of Winston Churchill—and the world knows how the ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... period of our history at which the state of Ireland formed a more important topic for the consideration of the British people than at the present moment. The hard-won earnings of their industry are applied to relieve her immediate wants, and to reduce her local burdens; while a change in their commercial policy, pregnant with the most momentous consequences, is sought to be effected, avowedly based upon the necessity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... life. They suggest stores of reserved nervous force to fall back upon, if any occasion should arise that requires it. This inexcitability, this presence at all times of power not used, I regard," continued Dr. Clouston, "as the great safeguard of our British people. The other thing in you gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought somehow to tone yourselves down. You really do carry too much expression, you take too intensely the ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... British residents. It should be noticed that the number of foreign firms and stores (i.e., non-British) have been and are increasing, while big British hongs are less numerous than before. Financially, the British people have certainly not been gainers by the acquisition of that colony. Of course I shall be told that it adds to the prestige of Great Britain, but this is an empty, bumptious boast dearly paid for by ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... him to leave them, and to allow her to finish the journey with the aid of the courier. But this he could not do. He wrote letters to his friends at the D. R. office, explaining his position as well as he could, and suggesting that this and that able assistant should enlighten the British people on this and that subject, which would,—in the course of nature, as arranged at the D. R. office,—have fallen into his hands. He and Mrs. Trevelyan became as brother and sister to each other on their way home,—as, indeed, it was natural that they should ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... what they really were as the graceful and beautiful papillon is unlike the hideous and filthy worm. In a word, he made them genteel, and that was enough to give them paramount sway over the minds of the British people. The public became Stuart-mad, and everybody, specially the women, said, "What a pity it was that we hadn't a Stuart to govern." All parties, Whig, Tory, or Radical, became Jacobite at heart, and admirers ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... 'High Art,' 'Symbolic Art,' 'Ecclesiastical Art,' 'Dramatic Art,' 'Tragic Art,' and so forth; and every well-educated person is expected, nowadays, to know something about Art. Yet in spite of all translations of German 'AEsthetic' treatises, and 'Kunstnovellen,' the mass of the British people cares very little about the matter, and sits contented under the imputation of 'bad taste.' Our stage, long since dead, does not revive; our poetry is dying; our music, like our architecture, only reproduces the past; our painting is only first-rate when it handles landscapes and animals, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... of the offending Power. The wrong which Captain Wilkes committed against the British flag was surely not so great as if he had seized the persons of British subjects—subjects, if you please, who were of kindred blood to one who stands as high in the affection of the British people as Washington stands in the affection of the American people,—if indeed there be such a one ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... grandeur and stability of the British empire lie in America.... I am therefore by no means for restoring Canada. If we keep it, all the country from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi will in another century be filled with British people. Britain itself will become vastly more populous by the immense increase to its commerce; the Atlantic sea will be covered with your trading ships; and your naval power, thence continually increasing, will extend your influence round ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... in your country, I presume, Sir Walter? The British people have been too long accustomed to sing that they 'never, never will be slaves.' Your Government is really more ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... to note the pressure of emergency, of deadly peril, upon a state, or if we fail to recognize that traditional habits of thought constitute with nations, as with individuals, a compulsive moral force which an opponent can control only by the display of adequate physical power. Such to the British people was the conviction of their right and need to compel the service of their native seamen, wherever found on the high seas. The conclusion of the writer is, that at a very early stage of the French Revolutionary Wars the United States ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... first have the best chance of staying, if only they are willing to learn; hardy plants will soon take the place of tender plants if left alone. The short dark people are still the main part, not only of the Welsh, but of the British people. It is true that their language has disappeared, except a few place-names. But languages are far more fleeting than races. The loss of its language does not show that a race is dead; it only shows that it is very anxious to change and learn. Some ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... Kentucky showed their sympathy with the just cause of the people of the Southern States, by leaving the home where they could not serve the cause of right against might, and nobly shared the fortunes of their Southern brethren on many a blood-dyed field. In like manner did the British people see with disapprobation their Government, while proclaiming neutrality, make new rules, and give new constructions to old ones, so as to favor our enemy and embarrass us. The Englishman's sense of fair-play, and the manly instinct which predisposes ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... years old. For seventeen years King George the Fifth had been an exile in the United States, and the fifty millions of British people had been on ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... bitter fight with Redmond," said Gilbert Galbraith, "Carson had displayed the qualities of a successful leader with strength of character and boldness of resource, and Redmond those of a weak, temporizing Stuart, and no man since Parnell had so browbeaten, insulted, and lashed with scorn the British people." ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... is thrilling. Now don't you see the Emperor was sick, The shadows falling slant across his mind To write to such an England: "My career Is ended and I come to sit me down Before the fireside of the British people, And claim protection from your Royal Highness"— This to the regent—"as a generous foe Most constant and most powerful"—I weep. They tricked him Gourgaud. Once upon the ship, He thinks he's bound for England, and why not? They dine him, treat him like an Emperor. And ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... all its marvellous contributions to human progress, left Ireland with her hopes unfulfilled; although its sun went down upon the British people with their greatest failure still staring them in the face, its last decade witnessed at first a change in the attitude of England towards Ireland, and afterwards a profound revolution in the thoughts of Ireland about herself. The ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... the two Sects which, at this moment, divide the more unsettled portion of the British People; and agitate that ever-vexed country. To the eye of the political Seer, their mutual relation, pregnant with the elements of discord and hostility, is far from consoling. These two principles of Dandiacal Self-worship or Demon-worship, and Poor-Slavish or Drudgical Earth-worship, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... own hearts, not on the state of Ireland, and the remedies sensible men could offer, but on the sentiments of Irishmen. His final test of legislation was to be, not its consonance with the judgment of the British people, but with the demand of the ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... apt to think English players very wooden, because when representing British people our actors and actresses are much restrained in movement. A French or Italian critic can hardly appreciate some of the splendid "Stage Society" or Court Theatre performances, such, for instance, as that of The Voysey Inheritance, which ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... in abuses which it is his duty to redress; and in this case no ruler of Oude can expect the Governor-General to incur a responsibility so repugnant to the principles of the British Government, and so odious to the feelings of the British people. ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... or menaces of the great and highly-placed shall induce me to depart by one jot or tittle from the course I have marked out for myself. And I take this occasion to assure all other potentates that I do not propose by any effort of mine to bring wealth to the foreigner. The welfare of the British people is my only care. For them, but for no others, my investments are open; to them alone I devote my unrivalled experience. And after this I trust I shall be troubled with no further ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 101, November 21, 1891 • Various
... that has implicated us in the destruction of the whole rising generation of the flower of our manhood; and, before this date, would have brought us under subjection to Germany but for the confidence placed by the rank and file of the British people and nation in ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... scarcely necessary to say that, in this hot competition of bigots and staves, the University of Oxford had the unquestioned pre-eminence. The glory of being further behind the age than any other portion of the British people, is one which that learned body acquired early, and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his way brooding darkly; for he knew that this was the beginning of a great trial for England and all British people. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... by a few spasmodic efforts, broke the threefold chain of Priest, King, and Noble, and began to lift up their head. But Saxon England is sober, and so went to work more solemnly than her mercurial neighbor. And besides, the British people had already a firm, broad basis of personal freedom to stand on. Much was thought, written, and spoken about reform in England, then most desperately needing it. The American Revolution had English admirers whom no courts ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... sudden stoppage of the immense trade that flowed from the colonial ports into those of the mother-country told dreadfully on the commerce of Great Britain; and British merchants and British manufacturers, and British people in general, soon began to suffer even more than the colonists themselves. Whereupon, a counter stream of petitions and remonstrances set in upon the king and parliament from the people at home, who declared that the country ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... accurately expressed by an historian of the English navy a hundred years ago, speaking then of Gibraltar and Port Mahon. "Military governments," said he, "agree so little with the industry of a trading people, and are in themselves so repugnant to the genius of the British people, that I do not wonder that men of good sense and of all parties have inclined to give up these, as Tangiers was given up." Having therefore no foreign establishments, either colonial or military, the ships of war of the United ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... 1824-5, Parliament had passed acts 'for building additional places of worship in the highlands and islands of Scotland.' These acts may be looked upon as one section in that general extension of religious machinery which the British people, by their government and their legislature, have for many years been promoting. Not, as is ordinarily said, that the weight of this duty had grown upon them simply through their own treacherous neglect of it during the latter half ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... formed upon any other basis than that of free trade, which prevails in England, that man is a Rip Van Winkle, who has been sleeping not only for the last seven but for the last forty-four years. The British people will not to-day go back upon the policy of free trade, and Canada is not in a position at the moment, {152} with the large revenue which she has to collect, to adopt any other tariff than a revenue tariff ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... of the British nation for an example. Most assuredly the British people are powerful in war, but their might and renown are in a great measure due to their proficiency in the works which make a time of peace ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... main object of my trip to England was to find out whether the British people have any sense of humour. No doubt the Geographical Society had this investigation in mind in not paying my expenses. Certainly on my return I was at once assailed with the question on all sides, "Have they got a sense of humour? Even if it is only a ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock |
