Top 76 British English Quotes
#1. I love English, though I now call it 'Anglo- American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power.
Maurice Druon
#2. I'm English and I am British. I don't know if I feel part of a music scene. Musically, I have as many feelings and affinity with Americans or Canadians, or all sorts of people as I do with English people.
David Gilmour
#3. What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?
Lynne Truss
#4. I love English girls! I adore all their different accents. Who knows, I could find a British girlfriend on my travels!
Austin Butler
#5. messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which,
Charles Dickens
#6. The British were white, English, and Protestant, just as we were. They had to have some other basis on which to justify independence, and happily they were able to formulate the inalienable truths set forth in the Declaration.
Samuel P. Huntington
#7. No. I am not a royalist. Not at all. I am definitely a republican in the British sense of the word. I just don't see the use of the monarchy though I'm fierce patriot. I'm proud proud proud of being English, but I think the monarchy symbolizes a lot of what was wrong with the country.
Daniel Radcliffe
#8. I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.
Ian McEwan
#9. On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.
Nelson Mandela
#10. A case could be made, in fact, that the English were the first victims of the British empire: without their conquest, that empire could not have been built.
Paul Kingsnorth
#11. I'm three quarters Scottish, but I sound English. I don't really see British as a race.
Joanna Lumley
#12. British people still wear clothes. By clothes I mean actual clothes: jackets and shirts and ties and suits. The spirit of Beau Brummell is still visible. English men make an effort. We've lost that in the US. Everyone is more concerned with being comfortable.
Tom Ford
#13. The English country house is certainly an icon of British culture.
Julian Fellowes
#14. The English, he thought, had once conquered most of the known world, but their cooking hadn't improved as a result.
Lavie Tidhar
#15. A genial and cultured Arab, Ameen Rihani, whose English is perfect and whose eloquence is astounding. He will discuss with equal eagerness and knowledge the merits of Picasso or Van Gogh, or the Zionist question, or the British achievements in Arabia.
Kenneth Williams
#16. It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes.
Sara Sheridan
#17. Afrikaans is my first language, although you would never know, as my English accent has more of an American-British thing going on from all my years of travelling.
Tanit Phoenix
#18. Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens
#19. One of the marked superiorities the English enjoy over other peoples is their ability to imbue the foreigner with a crippling inferiority complex the moment he sets foot on British soil.
Pierre Daninos
#20. this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more
Charles Dickens
#21. Theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in
Charles Dickens
#22. I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.
Stephen Fry
#23. Of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the
Charles Dickens
#24. 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.
Pete Townshend
#25. several hundred English lived on Tortuga, the westernmost part of the sprawling British Leeward Islands
Colin Woodard
#26. Using the passive voice is always very helpful. Mind you, a lot of that propaganda English emanates from here. The British establishment has always used the passive voice. It's been a weapon of discourse so those who committed terrible acts in the old empire could not be identified.
John Pilger
#27. Bowen looked nervously about for peasants. It would be unendurable if they all turned out to be full of instinctive wisdom and natural good manners and unself-conscious grace and a deep, articulate understanding of death.
Kingsley Amis
#28. As a rule the Holloywood pattern for English actors is simple. They are delighted to go, they are told there is a lot of work for them if they stick it out, they tell everyone how fabulous it is, they spend all their money - and then they come home. It seems to take from two to six years.
Julian Fellowes
#29. The British and Americans are two people separated by a common language.
George Bernard Shaw
#30. My folks were English. They were too poor to be British. I still have a bit of British in me. In fact, my blood type is solid marmalade.
Bob Hope
#31. The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.
Camille Paglia
#32. I may fight the British ruler, but I do not hate the English or their language. In fact, I appreciate their literary treasures.
Mahatma Gandhi
#33. Order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.
Charles Dickens
#35. Some trillions of years ago a sloppy, dirty giant flicked grease from his fingers. One of those gobs of grease is our universe on its way to the floor. Splat!
Brion Gysin
#36. I often find myself privately stewing about much British art, thinking that except for their tremendous gardens, that the English are not primarily visual artists, and are, in nearly unsurpassable ways, literary.
Jerry Saltz
#37. As if to proclaim his home a British Isle unto itself, Teabing had not only posted his signs in English, but he had installed his gate's intercom entry system on the right-hand side of the truck - the passenger's side everywhere in Europe except England.
Dan Brown
#38. The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine.
Honore De Balzac
#39. My folks were English ... we were too poor to be British.
Bob Hope
#40. I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?
James A. Michener
#41. 'Hot Fuss' was all based on fantasy. The English influences, the makeup - they were what I imagined rock was. I'm a dreamer, you know? So I dug into that dream and made 'Hot Fuss.' But hearing people call us 'the best British band from America' made me wonder about my family and who I was.
Brandon Flowers
#42. British garden history is best understood as a small incident in the histories of ideas, design and technology.
Tom Turner
#43. If you walk through Knightsbridge on any bland day of the week you won't hear an English accent. You'll hear every accent under the sun apart from the British accent.
Morrissey
#44. America has had an influence on me, as has going out with a Cuban-American guy and having lots of American friends. But I am still fundamentally British and speak with a British accent and feel very English.
Lily Cole
#45. I am not anti-English, I am not anti-British, I am not anti-any Government, but I am anti-untruth, anti-humbug and anti-injustice.
Mahatma Gandhi
#46. More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them.
Winston Churchill
#47. Earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important
Charles Dickens
#48. The British are absolutely hung up on class, and whenever they start to really - class for the English is like sex for Americans: They start to shake all over when the subject comes up.
Gore Vidal
#49. Redmond Howard, a politically aware witness to the Rising and a critic of the rebels, wrote in its aftermath: 'There never was, I believe, an Irish crime -- if crime it can be called -- which had not its roots in an English folly.
Tim Pat Coogan
#50. I considered the attacks on London useless, and I told the Fuhrer again and again that inasmuch as I knew the English people as well as I did my own people, I could never force them to their knees by attacking London. We might be able to subdue the Dutch people by such measures but not the British.
Hermann Goring
#52. What makes me really happy is a walk in the English countryside. A nice sunset, that British countryside - it means I'm home.
Natalie Dormer
#54. Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world's brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays.
Terry Teachout
#55. You know the only rule you need to know to get on in this country? 'Never complain, never explain.
Amanda Craig
#56. Surprisingly, it was not an American but a British company that opened an amusement park in 2007 called Dickens World, located in the English county of Kent, complete with an Ebenezer Scrooge Haunted House, a Great Expectations Boat Ride and the as-advertised 'costumed Dickensian characters.'
Matthew Pearl
#57. There is abundant proof that the opening of our ports always tends to raise the price of foreign corn to the price in the English market, and not to sink the price of British corn to the price in the continental market.
Joseph Hume
#58. I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.
Jo Walton
#59. The Canadian dialect of English ... seems roughly to be the result of applying British syntax to an American vocabulary.
Lister Sinclair
#60. How could the Rice Ring go on skinning the unfortunate peasant if it hadn't the Government behind it? The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English - or rather to gangs of Jews and Scotchmen.
George Orwell
#61. All we can infer (from the archaeological shards dug up in Berkshire, Devon and Yorkshire) is that the first Britons, whoever they were and however they came, arrived from elsewhere.
The land (Britain) was once utterly uninhibited. Then people came.
Robert Winder
#62. According to them, everyone wants to be English. Being English is the best thing in the world. (Far behind, the second best thing is being God himself.)
Angela Kiss
#63. Year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange
Charles Dickens
#64. When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that's become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.
Aasif Mandvi
#65. I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
Diane Wakoski
#66. The British capitalize on their accent when they don't want you to know what they're saying. But if you wake them up at 4 A.M., they speak perfect English, the same as we do.
Henry A. Kissinger
#67. Visit any bookshop in Europe, and the shelves are filled with English novels and non-fiction books in translation - while British bookshops stock mainly English and American works.
Kate Williams
#68. I would have thought you'd import an English staff?"
"Good heavens, no! I would not wish a British chef on anyone except the French tax collectors.
Dan Brown
#69. The British invented the classic look. Men's apparel was created in London, the great English style. You have to respect this country's suits, shirts, shoes, luggage.
Mickey Drexler
#70. At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.
Salman Rushdie
#71. There are 3 basic differences between we British and you Americans. One, we speak English, and you don't. Two, when we have a "World Championship", we invite teams from other nations. Three, when you meet the British head of State, you only have to get down on one knee.
John Cleese
#72. I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
Philip Pullman
#73. I went to the Alabama public schools at a time when my English teachers, all but one of whom was a woman, taught nothing but the classics. They revered the great British and American writers.
Thomas H. Cook
#74. The English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human
Charles Dickens
#75. Lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications
Charles Dickens
#76. A lot of American actors when they do Shakespeare put on a phoney English accent and it drives me crazy. You're always fighting against the idea that only the British know how to do Shakespeare.
Ethan Hawke
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