British Quotes

For wide swaths of training and education there are valuable spillovers which mean that the private sector needs support from the government. That is why I have been so determined to protect and grow apprenticeships and put higher education on a sustainable footing.

Britain is no longer one of the world's price setters. It is painful. It is a challenge to us in government to explain all that, and it is a pity that the political class is not preparing the public for it to understand how massive the problem is.

Billions of taxpayers' money has been wasted in bad deals. The London Underground modernisation, personally negotiated by one of Gordon Brown's team, was a disaster, as the National Audit Office has confirmed.

Banks operate like a man who either wears his trousers round his chest, stifling breathing, as now, or round his ankles, exposing his assets. We want their trousers tied round their middle: steady lending growth; particularly to productive British business, especially small scale enterprise.

And humility in politics means accepting that one party doesn't have all the answers; recognising that working in partnership is progress not treachery.

According to the papers, I'm miserable, alienated, and on the brink of resignation. But that's simply not where I am.

I don't feel comfortable with luxury, and I try to stay fairly normal.

You must never aspire to 'finish' a house, you can merely hope to start it, and from then on it's an evolutionary process.

While there is a great value in things that are old, it seems that the overwhelming challenge in Britain in the late 20th century is to make every effort to see value in the contemporary and in the future.

The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

That's one of the things about getting older isn't it? You suddenly realise that you are what you set out to be. And there are no role models any more.

Taste is more to do with manners than appearances. Taste is both myth and reality; it is not a style.

My wife and I both love cooking - I am an advanced male - so we argue about who gets to rustle up dinner.

It is sometimes easier to have furniture made than to find things.

In an age robbed of religious symbols, going to the shops replaces going to the church. We have a free choice, but at a price. We can win experience, but never achieve innocence. Marx knew that the epic activities of the modern world involve not lance and sword but dry goods.

If you were born in Britain after World War II, you see a continuous atmosphere of decline, moral and economic and political.

I wouldn't mind someone lobbing hand grenades at me, but having to reset the timer on the video recorder puts me into a blood-spitting frenzy.

I just don't understand how you can not be concerned about your appearance. From time to time I'm vilified as the person who cares about the look of a teapot - and it's not that I believe my taste is superior , I just can not believe that other people don't care.

I have no particular interest in antiquities or antiques, but I like things to meet a certain aesthetic.

I have a character failing. I am quite incapable of identifying with anything whole-heartedly. Whatever I am doing, I am always planning to do something else. I would rather travel than arrive.

Ten thousand pounds is the legal value of a negligently taken life, of a child or a parent. A cold and somewhat mean-spirited calculation: you would do better if you slipped on a paving-stone and broke a front tooth.

People's lives are in the care of the railways when they get on a train. The railways should remember that.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

Margaret Thatcher was in my year, and our first-year college photograph shows us standing side by side in the back row. We were both grammar school girls on state scholarships.

Life isn't so complicated for children. They have more time to think about the really important things. That's why I occasionally moralise in my children's books in a way I wouldn't dare when writing for adults.

If you are going to make companies, corporations, actually responsible for the safety of other people's lives, then if they fail in their duty, the only thing to prevent them failing in their duty is the fear that they would be put behind bars.

I've never found it made the slightest difference being a woman - though there is a sort of feeling that as you get older you're not so interesting.

I would hate to live in the country, unless I was living on a farm.

I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deci