Top 100 England English Sayings
#1. Every Anglophile has his own private England which is, of course, unrecognizable to the English.
Mark Dery
#2. As a student in England, I studied French and English literature. I read L'Etranger and the rhythm of the novel felt familiar to me - very African.
Sefi Atta
#3. Only 38 per cent of players in the Premier League are English; that is a damning statistic. Soon, the England manager will have to go scouting for players in the Championship - and when I say 'soon' I mean the next four or five years, perhaps even for the next World Cup.
Glenn Hoddle
#4. Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real centre of the household.
George Bernard Shaw
#5. when John Locke published his celebrated Letters concerning toleration in the aftermath of England's Glorious Revolution, he still excluded Roman Catholics and atheists from his proposals, on the grounds that they were enemies to the English state.
Diarmaid MacCulloch
#6. The English are probably more capable than most peoples of making revolutionary change without bloodshed. In England, if anywhere,it would be possible to abolish poverty without destroying liberty.
George Orwell
#7. One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.
Norman Mailer
#9. My father and mother emigrated to Canada in 1958, but there's nobody more English than an Englishman who no longer lives in England, and our home was a shrine to all things English.
Mike Myers
#10. I didn't want to fight a guy from England. What if I lose? Not that English guys aren't strong, but who wants to get beat up by a guy with that voice? That's not the most masculine voice to take a beating to.
Jay Mohr
#11. 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
#13. If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea.
Sean O'Casey
#14. England for him was no longer a real place, but a consecrated isle in the lake of forgetting, where the God of the English still strode through an imaginary Eden, admiring His works.
Roger Scruton
#15. The English inn stands permanently planted at the confluence of the roads of history, memory, and romance.
Martha Grimes
#16. Winds of the World, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro
And what should they know of England who only England know?
The English Flag, Stanza 1 (1891)
Rudyard Kipling
#17. What Americans call cross-ventilation, the English call draughts.
Hermione Gingold
#18. It has also been the peculiar lot of our country to be visited by the worst kind of English travellers.
Washington Irving
#19. So I went to bed, full, happy, and caring nothing for all the hurt of all the englished Welshmen that ever festered upon a proud land
Richard Llewellyn
#20. English? Who needs that? I'm never going to England.
Matt Groening
#21. Although I've lived in England for more than twenty years, I still have a foreigner's passion for all the details of English history and rural life.
Meg Rosoff
#22. I'm either the witch or Lady Macbeth of English politics, but someone gotta wear the pants in England when others wearing kilts
Margaret Thatcher
#23. Take away from English authors their copyrights, and you would very soon take away from England her authors.
Anthony Trollope
#24. It was a sweet view-sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.
Jane Austen
#25. English? Who needs to spend time learning that? I'm never going to England!
Dan Castellaneta
#26. All the youth now in England of free men, who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it, be set to learn as long as they are not fit for any other occupation, until they are able to read English writing well.
Alfred The Great
#27. Georgian England, to see those wonderful houses being built. And the clothes were interesting too, although I wouldn't want to wear a wig. It's also the most beautiful period of English landscape gardening. They had famous gardeners like Capability Brown.
Alan Titchmarsh
#28. I used to hate England because they ruled my country but I am happy they gave us the game of cricket, which they can't play very well, and the English language, which I can't speak very well,
Kapil Dev
#29. I have English family in Northhampton and have been to England numerous times.
Steve Kanaly
#30. Even on the first day we invaded Plover's house we sensed the conundrum that Americans are faced with in England: they're too frightened of English people to behave rudely to them, and too ignorant to know how to behave politely.
Lev Grossman
#31. Tea! The English could always be pacified with it!
Jean Plaidy
#32. With more insight into the English character, I poured out a stiff whisky and soda and placed it in front of the gloomy inspector.
Agatha Christie
#33. If an earthquake were to engulf England tomorrow, the English would manage to meet and dine somewhere among the rubbish, just to celebrate the event.
Douglas William Jerrold
#34. English people don't like to be told 'enjoy your meal'. They will enjoy their meal if they feel like enjoying it. It is advisable not to command them such things in case they have other plans with their meal, such as preferring to dislike it.
Angela Kiss
#35. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.
Ford Madox Ford
#36. I don't really know what Americans are like. I've no idea. I know a few things about them. In my imagination, they have warm peachy hearts, whereas the English have horrible spiteful withered hearts - success in England inspires envy - in America, it inspires hope.
Sebastian Horsley
#37. Ah sortay jist laugh whin some cats say that racism's an English thing and we're aw Jock Tamson's bairn up here ... it's likesay pure shite man, gadges talkin through their erses.
Irvine Welsh
#38. I was born in England - though both of my parents are American - and there's something about the 'Muppets' where they have this combination of English and American humor.
Nicholas Stoller
#39. If England had not used the services of privateers and pirates during its long struggle with Spain, there is some likelihood that people today in North America would be speaking Spanish rather than English.
Robert Earl Lee
#40. My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.
Garrison Keillor
#41. England and Greece are friends. English blood was shed on Greek soil in the war against fascism, and Greeks gave their lives to protect English pilots.
Melina Mercouri
#42. If he'd been English or Swedish, he'd have walked the England job.
Brian Clough
#43. And Thames and all the rivers of the kings Ran into Mississippi and were drowned. They planted England with a stubborn trust But the cleft dust was never English dust.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#44. In England, more than in any other country, science is felt rather than thought ... A defect of the English is their almost complete lack of systematic thinking. Science to them consists of a number of successful raids into the unknown.
John Desmond Bernal
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Let me tell you the following words as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder leading upward and upward: Herzl; the Zionist Congress; the English Uganda proposition; the future world war; the peace conference where with the help of England a free and Jewish Palestine will be created.
Max Nordau
#48. Only the English created a new England, settled not by subjects of the Crown resolved to live beyond the seas, but by pioneers and builders in a land of new promise.
Stephen W. Sears
#50. Everybody knows that England is the world of betting men, who are of a higher class than mere gamblers: to bet is in the English temperament.
Jules Verne
#51. In my opinion, a war between England and Germany was a war between brothers. In my inner self I admired the English government and political system.
Walter Schellenberg
#52. Every manager dreams of a job like this [the England job] and I will be sure to learn English within one month.
Fabio Capello
#53. I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.
Anthony Burgess
#55. There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.
Martin Amis
#56. Ultimately, to have a career in movies, to a certain extent, certainly in England, you can't sustain a career in just English movies.
Clive Owen
#57. The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.
George Bernard Shaw
#58. English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.
Agnes Repplier
#59. There is always that age-old thing about England and America being divided by a common language. You think that because we speak English and you speak English that you're bound to understand and like everything that we do. And of course you don't.
Rowan Atkinson
#60. Radio in England is nonexistent. It's very bad English use of a media system, typically English use.
David Bowie
#61. If you want to swim across the English Channel from England to France - you have to leave your doubt on the beach in England.
Lewis Gordon
#62. I grew up in a brick house. What's wrong with bricks? An Englishman took me aside and said, "You have to understand, all the bricklayers in England are Irish, and the English hate the Irish."
Carl Andre
#63. All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#64. The Spanish league is fantastic, but it has not the great passion the English Premiership has got.
Michael Owen
#65. They [the English] amuse themselves sadly as in the custom of their country.
[Fr., Ils s'amusaient tristement selon la contume de leur pays.]
Jean Froissart
#66. I was a supporting character in other people's lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.
Allegra Huston
#67. The smallpox vaccination was developed in the Ottoman Empire. The vaccine subsequently made its way to England through the wife of an English ambassador who observed the practice in Istanbul.
Firas Alkhateeb
#68. Cornwall, peopled mainly by Celts, but with an infusion of English blood, stands and always has stood apart from the rest of England, much, but in a less degree, as has Wales.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#69. In England the more horses a nobleman has, the more popular he is. So long as the English are devoted to racing, Socialism has no chance with you.
Otto Von Bismarck
#70. I was born in Mumbai, but I grew up in England, and then my adulthood has been in the States. I'm an American stuffed with an English person with an Indian person inside. I feel like those things kind of inform me in some way, which I think helps me as an actor.
Aasif Mandvi
#71. Saint George he was for England, And before he killed the dragon he drank a pint of English ale out of an English flagon.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#72. England's civil war had ended in a consensus as the English discovered that they hated foreigners more than they hated their own countrymen.
Len Deighton
#73. Remember: If you go for a walk with a friend in England, don't say a single word for hours; if you go for a walk with your dog, talk to it all the time.
George Mikes
#74. I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.
Peter Porter
#75. You English are like mad bulls ... you see red everywhere! What on earth has come over you, to heap on us such suspicion as is unworthy of a great nation. I regard this as a personal insult ... You make it uncommonly difficult for a man to remain friendly to England.
Wilhelm II
#76. The risks involved in the pursuit of magic are
put simply
either getting frightened by unpleasant perceptions or becoming deluded. Unfortunately it is possible to suffer from both symptoms at the same time.
Philip Carr-Gomm
#77. It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
P.D. James
#78. The popular image [in England] of Bonaparte as a blood-stained tyrant and bandit was admittedly exaggerated, but instinct told even the most radical among the English that if liberty, equality, and justice were ever to come to their shores, it certainly was not Napoleon who would bring them there.
J. Christopher Herold
#79. English players are as easy to coach. The problem is that the Premier League has the best players in the world, and statistically not all of them can be born in England. But we don't have enough English players: we are working very hard on it.
Arsene Wenger
#80. The English are probably the most tolerant, least religious people on earth.
David E. Goldberg
#81. The level of football in England is the top. English football is the leader in the world.
Pele
#82. London has been used as the emblematic English city, but it's far from representative of what life in England is actually about.
Alan Moore
#83. In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.
V.S. Naipaul
#84. I have always been English, ever since I emigrated from England and since the kids in Canada beat me up at the age of twelve for having an East London Cockney accent. I thank them for the cockney taunts because the beatings turned me on to boxing. But on a serious note Canada has been kind to me.
Lennox Lewis
#85. The local natives were particularly curious to know why the English required such huge quantities of pepper and there was much scratching of heads until it was finally agreed that English houses were so cold that the walls were plastered with crushed pepper in order to produce heat.
Giles Milton
#86. By the middle of Henry VIII's reign, the white meats - that is, dairy products - were considered common fare and people from all classes would eat meat whenever they could get it.
Clarissa Dickson Wright
#87. When just a kid, moved back to Canada and looking for a taste of England, I'd picked up a book of my Gram's, a dog-eared romance from the 'sixties about English hospital 'sisters' trying to get it on with the doctors, and thought it very shocking behaviour for nuns.
Roberta Pearce
#88. If you sit on an airplane and you tell the English person sitting next to you that you have a bomb in your bag, they would probably be pissed off. Not as much pissed off as if you were talking to them all the time during the journey, but still, quite pissed off.
Angela Kiss
#89. All of our affairs, since the union of crowns, have been managed by the advice of English ministers, and the principal offices of the kingdom filled with such men, as the court of England knew would be subservient to their designs.
Andrew Fletcher
#90. In the U.S., the term 'general aviation' means its exact opposite, the way 'public school' does in England. An English public school is private and, on top of that, exclusive. Likewise, general-aviation airports in the U.S. are for everyone but the general public.
Tom Wolfe
#91. The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising
themselves.
Wyndham Lewis
#92. It's such a surprise for the Eastern eyes to see,
That though the English are effete
They're quite impervious to heat.
Noel Coward
#93. American hunting is quite different from English hunting because we don't hunt to kill. Even if I wanted to kill a fox, I couldn't. They're too smart and they have too many ways to escape me, whereas they don't in England.
Rita Mae Brown
#94. You know, nobody eats in England. Three or four pints of English beer a night fills you. I can't say I'm very impressed with the food in America. it's all sort of bland. Like turkey sandwiches.
Anne Dudley
#95. The perfidious, savage, disdainful, stupid, slothful, inhospitable, stupid English.
Julius Caesar Scaliger
#96. I had no idea that the Scottish so loathed the English that their favorite team in the world is whichever one is presently playing England.
Bill Bryson
#97. It was hard for an American to understand the contented acceptance by English men and women of permanent places in the lowest social rank.
Virginia Gildersleeve
#98. The day I'm in England performing, English security let a man in a Batman suit climb Buckingham Palace. I felt so much safer ... Batman was on the wall of Buckingham Palace for five hours. Wouldn't happen in America - three minutes: dead Batman.
Christopher Titus
#99. A patrol had been sent out to look at the road between two towns, but some Portuguese had come along and told the patrol that this was one of the English magician's roads and was certain to disappear in an hour or two taking everyone upon it to Hell - or possibly England.
Susanna Clarke
#100. The only people who should play for England are English people
Jack Wilshere
