English It Quotes

#1. It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.

Billy Collins

#2. It's very strange to be completely naked in public," said Jacob. "It isn't something Americans ordinarily do."
"I can't say it's very English, either," replied Henry.
"It's a Scottish thing, though, isn't it? With all the kilts and all that.

Caleb Crain

#3. My first restoration was on 'Napoleon,' trying to put the French version in with the English version, and it was most unsatisfactory.

Kevin Brownlow

#4. I wasn't saying you were heartbroken." I sound like English is a new language for me, the way I stutter out the words. "I just meant it was hard for me to ... to watch."
He neither confirms nor denies that he might or might not have been even a teeny bit heartbroken.

Susan Ee

#5. If I said in one of my songs that my English teacher wanted to have sex with me in junior high, all I'm saying, is that I'm not gay, you know? People confuse the lyrics for me speaking my mind. I don't agree with that lifestyle, but if that lifestyle is for you, then it's your business.

Eminem

#6. I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.

James Joyce

#7. On the basis of this information, it would be possible to argue that if everybody spoke English (or Chinese or Esperanto for that matter) everybody would be at war even more often.

Andrew Dalby

#8. Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

Dean Wesley Smith

#9. My love of reading and the English language is something given to me by my parents, and I've passed it on to my children.

Corin Tucker

#10. Sitting here now today, I can forgive a lot of the English people because it only takes a hand full of bad people to do something stupid like that and it can make the whole country look bad.

Marvin Hagler

#11. And it occurred to me, standing there, just breathing with her, quiet settling around us, that those might be the three most beautiful words in the English language. We have time.

Ransom Riggs

#12. 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

#13. Baseball. If there's a more beautiful word in the English language. I have yet to hear it ... baseball has served as such a powerful link between Dad and me, and later between me and my son.

Tim Russert

#14. In high school, I once sang 'Let's Get It On' and 'Brown Sugar' with a band that included my English teacher and my math teacher.

Chris Pine

#15. Is it surprising that modern English land law should resemble a chaos rather than a system?

Edward Jenks

#16. If we do run, you'll need four legs to keep up with me today, Edwards. Oh that's right, you've been holding back because you're English, and it's not sporting to run down a girl. Well, this girl's been kicking your butt.

April White

#17. The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.

Colin Firth

#18. It is no exaggeration to describe plain English as a fundamental tool of government.

Margaret Thatcher

#19. I'm working on a film called 'Bonnie.' Bonnie means water. It's in English, and it's dealing with a future world in a megacity - which is what the U.N. says we're going to be - but in this megacity, a city that runs out of water.

Shekhar Kapur

#20. A whore, we've established that, filthy, it goes without saying, but whatever else the hell I am, I AM NOT ENGLISH.

Elizabeth Wein

#21. If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English Opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves the punishment of bearing it.

Margaret Fuller

#22. I was in the fashion shows in Milan; I was seventeen, I was doing like 100 shows. People were asking, 'How does it feel to be the model of the moment?' It was hard for me to answer as myself. I barely spoke English.

Gisele Bundchen

#23. I feel very English. I'm proud of it. I wanted there to be a thread connecting everything, the songs, clothes, artwork, even the string arrangements. It all creates a certain atmosphere.

Gabrielle Aplin

#24. The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#25. John Locke invented common sense, and only Englishmen have had it ever since!

Bertrand Russell

#26. It's okay to be proud of your good English. But don't be proud of being poor at your Mother tongue. Only the scum of the earth do that.

Manasa Rao

#27. I spent the period reading the first novel assigned for English. And wow. If I hadn't realized I was in France yet, I do now. Because Like Water for Chocolate has sex in it. LOTS of sex.

Stephanie Perkins

#28. I'll buy it right now, Jack," said an English voice, somehow familiar, "if you stop being such a fucking tosser, that is.

Neal Stephenson

#29. In the States, the Abdication story, for example, is portrayed as The World Well Lost For Love while the English, of a certain type anyway, see it only as childish, irresponsible and absurd.

Julian Fellowes

#30. Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English ... ?

Chris Cleave

#31. I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.

William Golding

#32. During the settling of the American colonies, it was said that the Spaniards would first build a church, the Dutch would first build a fort and the English a tavern. Welcome to Charleston, an English colony founded in 1670.

Mark R. Jones

#33. 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

#34. The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.

Oscar Wilde

#35. Canada could have enjoyed: English government, French culture, and American know-how. Instead it ended up with: English know-how, French government, and American culture.

John Robert Colombo

#36. The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long life seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed.
..

Virginia Woolf

#37. The English public doesn't really like Shakespeare; it prefers football.

Hesketh Pearson

#38. 'Jane Eyre,' when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.

Edward P. Jones

#39. But why have you dear English Jew whose forefathers fought to enter the country of Johnny Mill, the Stuart with a little heart, saunter in Haridwar, no pubs or fish and chips' counters here, only Ganga-Jal, -the holy ale- Quaff it for the spirit and carry it to the banks of Thames in a holy grail.

Aporva Kala

#40. When I was a kid, it was thought I would do something in the visual arts because I was always drawing, but when we emigrated to Australia from Holland when I was seven, I learnt the English language, and I fell in love with it.

Michel Faber

#41. I loved English literature - if didn't it would have been hard - but I had to learn it myself. I remembered ways to repeat words, to put more emphasis on certain lines.

Benjamin Clementine

#42. Slave holding is very unusual among the English-speaking peoples. Canadians didn't do it. Australians didn't do it. The Democratic Party and the states they controlled did it!

Sean Hannity

#43. Homework's hard. Especially math. My kids joke with me. They tell me they have homework. I say, 'Okay.' And then I sit down and they say, 'It's math.' 'No! Not math! English, history, anything!'

Angelina Jolie

#44. I can't even talk the way these people talk. 'Why you ain't?' 'Where you is?' Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.

Bill Cosby

#45. It doesn't matter what the income level of your family is, or if English is the first or second language. It makes no difference. The bottom line is that every child can be an academic champion, an academic champion and a superstar in academics.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#46. God gets it. When you reach out to him, he's not looking for fancy words that would impress your English teacher. He sees your heart. A groan, a look, a sigh - he speaks every language. He understands.

Max Lucado

#47. God bless whoever invented football. It was the English, I think. And what a fantastic idea it was

Paolo Rossi

#48. The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.

Robert Fitzgerald

#49. Films about the English monarchy, they tend to have a lavishness, sumptuous imagery, it's all very posh and rich.

Tom Hooper

#50. Seriously, you don't have to know English. It'd be nice, a nice little plus. We don't want miracles. You don't have to know the country's language. But just some shapes, that's all. A square. A little geometry.

David Spade

#51. Has the casual use of profanity in English reached a high tide? That's a rhetorical question, but I'm going to answer it anyway: Fuck yeah.

Mary Norris

#52. Where's our teacher?"
"Probably getting it on with the English teacher."
- Alex Gold and Mike Wilson

R.J. Morse, R.J. Brookes

#53. It is not always easy for a young player to come through at the club level, because all the clubs are able to buy for 20 million or 30 million and it is hard for young English talent to come through and to get recognition and be able to be part of the squad or start playing.

Edwin Van Der Sar

#54. People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

John McWhorter

#55. The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.

Wilfred Owen

#56. I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.

Christopher Hitchens

#57. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

P.D. James

#58. Better not I tell you. You want to know what I do? I say doudou, if you have trouble you are right to come to me. And I kiss her. It's when I kiss her she cry - not before.

Jean Rhys

#59. Everyone knows English is my second language and my vocabulary is not as broad as it is in Spanish, and because of this, sometimes I use the wrong words to express myself.

Juan Pablo Galavis

#60. You don't want to lose the foreign feel of a book entirely, but for me the prime requisite is to get it sounding good in English. If it sounds clumsy, readers will pounce on it of course.

Anthea Bell

#61. I believe in eating smaller meals more often throughout the day to keep the metabolism going. Don't deprive yourself, just make better choices. At 50 years old it is definitely a lot harder to stay in shape then it was when I was in my 20's.

Todd English

#62. I'd been trying for a while to get parts that weren't just the English bad guy, so it was quite refreshing to be playing someone who was a compassionate, decent guy.

Sean Bean

#63. The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

Sara Sheridan

#64. 'Ulysses' is the greatest anti-racist text in the English language, and it challenges right from the beginning the vicious racism which lies near the foundations of the Irish Free State and of the Irish republic.

Tom Paulin

#65. I was always aware of what the language I was using meant in terms of my bond with my parents - how it defined the lines of affection between us. When I spoke English, I felt I wasn't completely their child any more but the child of another language.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#66. I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.

F. Sionil Jose

#67. [Dennis Mathis] was very sensitive about keeping the unique way that I spoke English - it had a lot of Mexicanisms or Mexican syntax. So you keep it in because it's adding something unique.

Sandra Cisneros

#68. It was the seventeenth-century English who gave corned beef its name - corns being any kind of small bits, in this case salt crystals.

Mark Kurlansky

#69. I don't know why that is, but English politics is just so overly white. It's very much about the class structure.

Daniel Radcliffe

#70. I swear on Peter Stuyvesant's peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston's communitarian English majors.

Sarah Vowell

#71. It has always been very difficult for writers to survive commercially in India because the market was so small. But that's not true at all any more. It's one of the world's fastest growing and most vibrant markets for books, especially in English.

Aravind Adiga

#72. I think in the past, around the time that method acting became so prevalent, it used to be that American actors were thought to be the kind that would work more from the inside out, and that the English actors worked more from the outside in.

Annette Bening

#73. Why do elites hate the poor? It's xenophobia. They don't know any poor people - except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don't speak English.

P. J. O'Rourke

#74. Through radio I look forward to a United States of the World. Radio is standardizing the peoples of the Earth, English will become the universal language because it is predominantly the language of the ether. The most important aspect of radio is its sociological influence. (1926)

Arthur E. Kennelly

#75. The basic rhymes in English are masculine, which is to say that the last syllable of the line is stressed: 'lane' rhymes with 'pain,' but it also rhymes with 'urbane' since the last syllable of 'urbane' is stressed. 'Lane' does not rhyme with 'methane.'

James Fenton

#76. Yes, it would nice for this fifty year period, this cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language, to include a vampire tale by Edgar Allan Poe. But the sad answer is that Poe never penned a vampire story.

Andrew Barger

#77. It was decided almost two hundred years ago that English should be the language spoken in the United States. It is not known, however, why this decision has not been carried out.

George Mikes

#78. My father was the son of immigrants, and he grew up bilingual, but English is what my father taught me and what he spoke to me. America's strength is not our diversity; it is our ability to unite around common principles even when we come from different backgrounds.

Ernest Istook

#79. Pride! In English it is a Deadly Sin. But in Urdu it is fakhr and nazish - both names that you can find more than once on our family tree.

Kamila Shamsie

#80. I wish I were not sensual... I wish I had not got from my mother, or my father was it, this need to grasp and be grasped, because it drives me into the arms of idiots who want to crush me. Wonderful, idiotic, crushing in the night. Can't you just crush me in the night?

Howard Barker

#81. 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

#82. Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you.

Barack Obama

#83. The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

G.K. Chesterton

#84. I was sent to a school with bosses for teachers- no Twain, only cane; check your dick you harry, no Dickens either, No Tom Sawyers no David Copperfields only Webster, master it for grammar, the Wren with a dash of Martini-Drink deep.

Aporva Kala

#85. English dialogue is the best in the world. So dry and direct. The Italian language is beautiful, but it is too literary.

Bernardo Bertolucci

#86. 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

#87. It's funny because I'm so used to acting in English that any time I have these moments where I have to speak Russian, it definitely takes a different part of my brain to pull it off, but it's always nice and fun.

Ksenia Solo

#88. The secret of Soto Zen is just two words: not always so ... In Japanese, it's two words, three words in English. That is the secret of our practice.

Shunryu Suzuki

#89. The way I think or sing about something is very different if it is in Spanish or English.

Prince Royce

#90. In English we say 'we are' but it's proper to say 'we are becoming' because things are becoming.

Nhat Hanh

#91. I didn't understand how funny this play Much Ado About Nothing truly was until I became an English teacher and had to teach it. There is no wittier dialogue anywhere.

Dan Brown

#92. as the descendants of the Normans finally amalgamated with the English natives, the Anglo-Saxon language reasserted itself; but in its poverty it had to borrow hundreds of French words (literary, intellectual, and cultural) before it could become the language of literature.

Richard A. LaFleur

#93. I went to study English for two reasons. Principally because when I was in university, studying drama wasn't considered an option. You couldn't get a degree course for it. And so many plays and things that I was interested in landed themselves in a broader spectrum of literature.

James Callis

#94. I think the English are bipolar. 'We're the greatest, no we're terrible' - that's a constant English struggle. Crime is down, there's little poverty - yet it's always the worst time to have lived here.

Dara O Briain

#95. English should not stoop to embrace the lowest common denominator. Rather, society should step up and grant the language the respect it deserves.

Terry Fallis

#96. Radio in England is nonexistent. It's very bad English use of a media system, typically English use.

David Bowie

#97. The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.

Bernard Bailyn

#98. It took me a year to really learn the American lingo. I really feel for people who are coming here and don't speak English at all. It must be hell.

Helen Reddy

#99. In Spanish, I record a lot of single-voice tracks, and in English, I 'stack' a lot of voices, so it's very different, and I think I got so used to recording in Spanish for six years that it was really refreshing and challenging to get in and record 'Double Vision' in English.

Prince Royce

#100. At all periods of the [English] language it is difficult to assign a beginning date to most new words and meanings. They tend to slip into the language silently, and are placed in date order only when scholars subsequently get to work.

Robert Burchfield