Suez Canal Quotes

Egypt is a large, complex, very important country.

We can not subscribe to one law for the weak and another law for the strong; one law for us, another for our opponents.

Egypt does not possess rich natural resources. Its agricultural area is relatively small - less than 10 per cent of the total land. Its growth relies on tourism, Suez Canal tariffs, and foreign investment.

During the last few weeks I have felt that the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing room.

We are not at war with Egypt. We are in an armed conflict.

Our quarrel is not with Egypt, still less with the Arab world. It is with Colonel Nasser. He has shown that he is not a man who can be trusted to keep an agreement. Now he has torn up all his country's promises to the Suez Canal Company and has even gone back on his own statements.

You have it, madam.

We are not now a country of Africa but a country of Europe.

We sit there because there is a war going on. But once we have peace we don’t want to be sitting on your Suez Canal.

The war shall give us our land. The concept of "ours" and "not ours" are peace concepts only, they lose their meaning during war.

Between 1945 and 1965, the number of colonial people ruled by the British monarch plunged from 700 million to five million. In 1956, just three years after the coronation, the Suez canal crisis and Anthony Eden's humiliation ended all notions that Britain was a world superpower.

I find Suez astonishing for the first hour. It is a ditch in a desert, but a stunning one. The sensation of being hemmed in by huge ships, moving at a stately pace through a man-made waterway, is extraordinary.

The British Government

A new State of Israel with broad frontiers, strong and solid, with the authority of the Israel Government extending from the Jordan to the Suez Canal.