Heather Brooke Quotes

I believe the public schools are the greatest cultural influence in this country.

In the United States, nobody needs to remind people of their own role or their own power in creating the future they want to see. Perhaps it is something that is almost written into your cultural DNA: a desire to answer your Founding Fathers' call to create a 'more perfect union.'

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

British girls are as temperamental as Americans.

American actors are all muscular, tanned, white teeth and they have this indestructible confidence. We British are all... Dare I say it? Pessimistic.

I like the British public. There is something in this country called tall poppy syndrome. You're good but you're not that good, pal, OK? The natural state of our nation is slightly miserable, and probably the healthier for it. In America you don't get a key down the side of your Bentley.

My top priority is for people to understand that they have the power to change things themselves.

Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.

An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.

I'm self-deprecating because I'm British, and that's what we're supposed to be. I'm sure if I was American, I'd tell you how great I was.

The how-to-do-it always comes to the person who believes he can do it.

There's a reason why young people think what they think. They are taught it. In many cases when they learn at home is erased or countered or overcome.

I think Americans have always been pretty outspoken. I always found that if you had emotions in England, it's like, 'Here's a cup of tea.'

I think it's impossible to predict the future but it is possible to look at the past and see how one can do differently from what one's ancestors have done and learn from their mistakes, and one can see how even though there are enormous forces which stop one doing what one wants to, there are little holes in which the individual can do something.

What people will - or will not - laugh at is mainly determined by their social conditioning.

Growing up in England, of course you do absorb certain ways the royals wave their hands and carry themselves.

I feel like I came from a generation where... We didn't have Vietnam. We didn't have World War II. Nothing cultural was thrust upon us to make men out of us, so you're kind of free to not grow up that way if you don't want to.

People are really looking for greater sense of control of what happens in their lives, about the issues they really care about, and they feel that the political system doesn't necessarily deliver.

There are a lot of things that people learn and live through culture first, and politics comes afterward.

I've always been the type of person that thinks, 'If someone else can do it, so can I.'

Nobody is powerless.

I'm sure there's some sort of cynicism or fatalism in Ireland and England. We are fatalistic here, and sometimes we need to be shaken out of that.

In my village, people believed that women should stay in their homes. However, I followed my heart and showed them that I'll not succumb to their regressive ideals.

America's parenting customs can shock foreigners.

I'm not going to let other people set my limitations.