British Raj Quotes

It is not wholly surprising, however, that, when India began to reassert herself, two nations should have replaced the single British Raj; but all impartial students must regret that the unity of the Indian sub-continent has been once more lost, and trust that the two great nations of India and Pakistan may soon forget the bitterness born of centuries of strife, in cooperation for the common welfare of their peoples. ~ Arthur Llewellyn Basham

Writing fiction is a respectable way of fibbing for a living - and enjoying it!
-Anne George ~ Anne George

An excellent introduction to the rise and fall of the British Raj, accurate, succinct, and engaging. ~ Stanley Wolpert

My grandfather was an ordinary British citizen in the time of British Raj. He used to have Bengali friends from whom I learnt Bengali. ~ Fahmid Hassan Prohor

Famines occur under a colonial administration, like the British Raj in India or for that matter in Ireland, or under military dictators in one country after another, like Somalia and Ethiopia, or in one-party states like the Soviet Union and China. ~ Amartya Sen

The country was passing through turbulent times. British Raj was on its last legs. The World War had sucked the juice out of the British economy. Britain neither had the resources nor the will to hold on to a country the size of India. Sensing the British weakness and lack of resources to rule, different leagues of Indians sniffed different destinies in the air following the imminent exit of the British: a long stretch of Nehru Raj, Hindu Raj extending from Kashmir to Kerala not seen since Emperor Ashoka in third-century BCE before the emperor himself renounced Hinduism and turned a non-violent Buddhist, a Muslim-majority state carved out of two shoulders of India with a necklace-like corridor running through her bosom along Grand Trunk Road, balkanisation of the country with princes ruling the roost, and total chaos.
From August 1946 onwards, chaos appeared to be the most likely destiny as it spurted in Bengal, Bihar, and United Provinces, ending in the carnage of minority communities at every place.
The predicament of British government was how to cut their losses and run without many British casualties before the inevitable chaos spread to the whole country.
The predicament of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, was how to achieve his dream of Muslim-majority Pakistan carved out of India before his imminent demise from tuberculosis he suffered from, about which - apart from his doctor - only a handful of his closest relations and friends ~ Manjit Sachdeva

Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Praise to our Indian brothers, and the dark face have his due!
Thanks to the kindly dark faces who fought with us, faithful and few,
Fought with the bravest among us, and drove them, and smote them, and slew.
That ever upon the topment roof our banner in India blew. ~ Alfred Tennyson

It is our job to work for the government of the day and so that means working for Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, and we need to do those preparations just to be sure that we're ready for whoever you, the British public, elect and that's core to our civil service values over the last 150 years. ~ Gus O'Donnell

For many, the icon of the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone, that administrative by-product of the Greek imperial adventure in Africa. ~ Neil MacGregor

If Aristotle, Livy, and Harrington knew what a republic was, the British constitution is much more like a republic than an empire. They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men. If this definition is just, the British constitution is nothing more or less than a republic, in which the king is first magistrate. This office being hereditary, and being possessed of such ample and splendid prerogatives, is no objection to the government's being a republic, as long as it is bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making, and a right to defend. ~ John Adams

This is what songs do, even dumb pop songs: they remind us that emotions are not an inconvenient and vaguely embarrassing aspect of the human enterprise but its central purpose. They make us feel specific things we might never have felt otherwise. Every time I listen to "Sunday Bloody Sunday," for instance, I feel a pugnacious righteousness about the fate of the Irish people. I hear that thwacking military drumbeat and Bono starts wailing about the news he heard today and I'm basically ready to enlist in the IRA and stomp some British Protestant Imperialist Ass, hell yes, bring on the fucking bangers and mash and let's get this McJihad started. ~ Steve Almond

My Mother is Swedish and my Father is Scottish, he played for Charlton in the 1960's and was in the Army, he captained the British forces team. We then moved to S.A. because a lot of players did that at the time. ~ Richard Gough

​Till mirrors were Invented, Face was not You, Not Even part of Your Performance. ~ Vineet Raj Kapoor

I was lucky that one of my first movies, 'One Million Years B.C.' was made in Europe by a British company. The Brits, and a lot of the rest of Europe, seemed to really love exotic women. The fact that I was American and exotic just made me more appealing to them. ~ Raquel Welch

This sympathy is not translated into force against the British government because it is not like the anti- apartheid movement which had a high profile here and Mandela is a more engaging figure than Yasser Arafat. ~ Tom Paulin

In Great Britain, woman was subordinate and confined. But at least she was also safe. ~ Linda Colley

We British play an important role in Europe, even if we have a traditional and historical ambivalence towards the continent. ~ Lionel Barber

In spite of these disasters, some of the tribesmen continued to fight for their territory, but they were quickly overwhelmed and taken into captivity, placed aboard ships and sold as slaves in the West Indies. At the same time the whites were bringing to America their own slaves whose skins were black. The first shipments of these unfortunates were brought to Jamestown for sale by the Dutch in 1619. Within two decades the British realized what a lucrative trade slavery was, so they ousted the Dutch slave traders and, in 1639, established their own Royal African Company to make massive raids on the native villages of the Dark Continent and bring the chained captives to America to satisfy the ever-growing demand for slave labor.6 In all such matters, the human cruelty inflicted on people of either red skin or black was of precious little concern to the imperious British. ~ Allan W. Eckert

Cultures, when they meet, influence one another, whether people like it or not. But Americans don't have any way of describing this secret that has been going on for more than two hundred years. The intermarriage of the Indian and the African in America, for example, has been constant and thorough. Colin Powell tells us in his autobiography that he is Scotch, Irish, African, Indian, and British, but all we hear is that he is African. ~ Richard Rodriguez

I have been long associated with British music. I have favoured it as my alternate music next to American. ~ Leonard Slatkin

People who know fresh cod - from the great restaurants of France, to British working-class fish shops, to the St. John's waterfront - all agree on three things: It should be cooked quickly and gently, it should be prepared simply, and, above all, it must be a thick piece. Only a large piece can be properly cooked. ~ Mark Kurlansky

Drug warriors' staunch opposition to needle exchanges to prevent the spread of HIV in addicts delayed the programs' widespread introduction in most states for years. A federal ban on funding for these programs wasn't lifted until 2009. Contrast this with what happened in the U.K. At the peak of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1990s, the HIV infection rate in IV drug users in the U.K. was about 1%. In New York City, the American epicenter, that figure was 50%. The British had introduced widespread needle exchange in 1986. That country had no heterosexual AIDS epidemic. ~ Maia Szalavitz

In one line of his poem he said good fences make good neighbors. I'd like to think that Alaska and British Columbia working together can prove that we can be pretty darned good neighbors without fences. ~ Dan Miller

You from?" the driver asked with a complete lack of interest. "Liverpool." "Limey, huh? Well, you'll be all right. It's the goddamn New York Jews cause all the trouble." I found myself with a British inflection and by no means one of Liverpool. "Jews - what? How do they cause trouble?" "Why, hell, mister. We know how to take care of this. Everybody's happy and getting along fine. Why, I like niggers. And them goddamn New York Jews come in and stir the niggers up. They just stay in New York there wouldn't be no trouble. Ought to take them out. ~ John Steinbeck

I don't sit around complaining about the lack of good roles. I will play Raj 85 times and still make him different. ~ Shahrukh Khan

We (British) have reached the state where the private sector is that part of the economy the government controls and the public sector is that part that nobody controls. ~ James Goldsmith

Yer a good lad, Atticus, mowin' me lawn and killin' what Brits come around. ~ Kevin Hearne

Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence ... they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press. ... a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have ~ Amartya Sen

Rose West was starting 10 life sentences with no prospect of ever being released, Fred West had gone to hell, I had got my life back and the media circus had moved on to the next big scoop. ~ Stephen Richards

The British have been particularly shy about the issues of financial regulation, and attentive only to the interests of the City - hence their reluctance to see the introduction of a tax on financial transactions and tax harmonisation in Europe. ~ Francois Hollande

In 1975, the respected British medical journal Lancet reported on a study which compared the effect on cancer patients of (1) a single chemotherapy, (2) multiple chemotherapy, and (3) no treatment at all. No treatment 'proved a significantly better policy for patients' survival and for quality of remaining life.' ~ Barry Lynes

When the clowns of British politics - arch-Brexiteer cartoon characters 'Boorish Johnson' and 'JackOff Grease-Smug' advocate ad infinitum that Britain should leave the EU in order to be free to sign her own trade deals; they seem to have overlooked the towering elephant in the room, namely the current occupant of the White House (another clown) - who appears hell-bent on destabilising world trade via crude protectionist policies. Both Tories, despite receiving the best British education money can buy, would do well to revisit their post war history books and be reminded of one of the key objectives of the European Project and in due course the European Union - specifically to promote peace and prosperity amongst previously warring neighbours by forming a unified trading bloc which in time, due to its effective size, also acted as a useful counterweight to US hegemony. Go find another circus for your buffoonery and leave the deadly serious business of politics to principled individuals with the true national interest at heart ! ~ Alex Morritt

The Spanish and Portuguese empires proclaimed that it was not riches they sought in the Indies and America, but converts to the true faith. The sun never set on the British mission to spread the twin gospels of liberalism and free trade. The Soviets felt duty-bound to facilitate the inexorable historical march from capitalism towards the utopian dictatorship of the proletariat. Many Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Well, I'm British. I'm proud to be British and I love this country. I'm going nowhere. ~ Jay Kay

Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century. ~ Nick Harkaway

The failure of the talks between Chamberlain and the German ambassador in London, the public and private outbursts of the Kaiser, the well-reported anti-British and pro-Boer sentiment among the German public, even the silly controversy over whether Chamberlain had insulted the Prussian army, all left their residue of mistrust and resentments in Britain as well as in Germany. ~ Margaret MacMillan

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy - not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side. ~ Eric Hobsbawm

I want to forewarn you," Bryon says seriously. "It's very possible that I may start talking with a southern accent."
"That's all right as long as I can do my British accent."
He squints and shakes his head. "No. That's stupid. Those don't even match. Can you do a country backwoods toothless mumble? Because that'll work. ~ Cheryl McIntyre

At the end of the day, flirting is a pretty universal language. Americans are more direct. British people are more indirect about everything ~ Rachel Weisz

I am not at all sure that the majority of the human race have not been ugly, and even among those "lords of their kind," the British, squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy complexions are not startling exceptions. Yet there is a great deal of family love amongst us. I have a friend or two whose class of features is such that the Apollo curl on the summit of their brows would be decidedly trying; yet to my certain knowledge tender hearts have beaten for them, and their miniatures - flattering, but still not lovely - are kissed in secret by motherly lips. I have seen many an excellent matron, who could have never in her best days have been handsome, and yet she had a packet of yellow love-letters in a private drawer, and sweet children showered kisses on her sallow cheeks. And I believe there have been plenty of young heroes, of middle stature and feeble beards, who have felt quite sure they could never love anything more insignificant than a Diana, and yet have found themselves in middle life happily settled with a wife who waddles. Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty - it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it. ~ George Eliot

After repeating almost everything I said, I excused my
accent and told them that I knew I spoke like I had plums in my mouth.
I then had to explain that was a British expression, as their faces read as
though I was saying I'd had their brother-in-law's balls on my tongue. ~ Greg Hogben

Although I don't have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears. ~ Morrissey

Choochiness is yet another British term that has no precise meaning, but, like pornography, you know it when you see it. The way I have things stacked up, choochiness is a particularly British amalgam of cuddlywuddliness, cutesypiedness, and butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouthedness that embraces everything from shops named The Ketch to Hugh Grant's stammer. It is a grating and often maddening behavioral pattern that makes others want to reach out and pinch the choochster's cheeks while secretly longing to stuff a hand grenade right down his throat. "Paul McCartney is choochy; John Lennon is not," says my brother-in-law, Max, who fled England for France in 1976, largely to escape from rampant choochiness. "Paul McCartney: choochy. John Lennon: not choochy. That's the difference." THERE ~ Joe Queenan

God has given you the same brain, so use your own in stead of borrowing ideas from somebody else. Think about and fathom the ideas before following them. ~ Raj Singh

Christianity in India is inextricably mixed up for the last hundred and fifty years with the British rule. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Sir Edward Grey was a thin man with a face like a skull. He disliked foreigners and almost never traveled abroad: in British eyes, that made him the perfect foreign secretary. "Thank ~ Ken Follett

I would wish for more British involvement in Europe, not less. ~ Wolfgang Schauble

If there is any emergence of a fourth party in British politics, it is the task of the Liberal Party to strangle it at birth. ~ Cyril Smith

Be the change you wish to see in the world," said Gandhi. If you want a nonviolent world, you cannot use violence to achieve it. He also said, "In the end the British will walk out because 100,000 British cannot control 350 million Indians if those Indians refuse to cooperate. ~ Russell Brand