British Society Quotes

Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven.

Britain's way of dealing with disability is just to try and pretend it's not happening. A swift sweep under the carpet.

Britain is rich in radicalism, and anyone who says that our society has drifted into fatalism and apathy should get out more.

I think dysfunctional people are being funneled into very corporate behaviour. Look at the Brits... no one's fighting, and it's boring.

What a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Everything about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S.... Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it.

Science fiction has always been a means for political comment. H.G. Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' wasn't about a Martian invasion - it was a critique of British colonialism, and... 'The Time Machine' is really an indictment of the British class system.

At the start of the 21st century, Britain is caught in a confusing riptide of anxiety. Of course racism still exists, but things have improved to a point where many ethnic minority Britons do not experience it as a regular feature in their lives.

We have had suicide bombers in London and we are seeing riots across the Channel. However the media and our Government try to cloud the issue by blaming British and French society and not the terrorists and rioters. They deliberately avoid pinpointing the driving force behind these attacks, which is a religion that is alien to these shores and in its latest fundamental form threatens our very way of life

When I am back in old Blighty, I am surrounded by the old and familiar concerns: New Labour, Europe, the Middle East and the rest. If you live in Britain, you will know what I mean - except you won't, because you will take it for granted that this is what the world is all about.

In all my novels, I deal with the many problems and prejudices which exist for Black people in Britain today.

The characters in 'Be Near Me' come from a genuine place, a Britain that is more than one country and more than one ideal.

I find in Britain people are both more arty and more willing to rip you off.

We know that the British public are obsessed with class.

The most likely victim of actual religious discrimination in British society is a Muslim, but the person who is most likely to feel slighted because of their religion is an evangelical Christian.

Well I grew up in England, and I was in the London police.

The 1970s - I was ten in 1975 - were a bad decade in all sorts of ways but the middle class had comfortable assumptions about the prospects for its children. The middle class was smaller then; it was a much less competitive Britain, less meritocratic.

Wherever I've been, I've left people who joined Hizb ut-Tahrir. I have to make amends. What I did was damaging to British society and the world at large.

There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes.

I remember a picture on the front page of the 'Sun' during the Brixton riots: a rasta guy with a petrol bomb, and a headline saying something like: 'The Future of Britain.' And I thought: 'Wow! Look at the power of that image,' and I wanted to get behind the camera to make these people three-dimensional.

If the British public were shown slavery in their own society seen through the eyes of the enslaved, they would get a much better understanding.

Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.

We have to challenge the whole idea that it's acceptable for a society like Britain to have such a significant number of people who do not work one day of the week and don't have any possibility of improving the quality of their lives.

You can watch TV and see experts of all different colours and hues. But the minute you get past nine o'clock and you're in primetime drama land, it's like entering another world, one that doesn't reflect the diversity of the society that we have in Britain in 2016.

Yes, look, social class is definitely an issue in Britain, it is definitely an issue and I think that most people across the country would sympathise with the idea that there are lots of people with talent and ability all across this country who want to make more of themselves and part of the responsibility of government is to make that happen.

When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub or queue than in any other country in which I have lived