Top 74 English Or American Quotes
#1. I could speak to you and say, 'Laytay-chai, paisey, paisey.' ... Why aren't you responding? Oh, you don't speak Swahili. Well, I've got news for you. The dog doesn't speak English, or American, or Spanish, or French.
Ian Dunbar
#2. I wish to understand [Plato], but to treat him with as little reverence as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism.
Bertrand Russell
#3. I think now, more than anytime I can remember, bands are sounding pretty similar whether they're English or American, from Manchester or London ... or Leeds or Welsh or Irish.
Graham Coxon
#4. The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.
Michael Eric Dyson
#5. Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
Gore Vidal
#6. It is said that the American vocabulary has declined by half in the past few decades. It's a tragic instance of desertification following upon monocultural commodity production, the clear-cutting of written and spoken English.
Stephanie Mills
#7. You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?
Christopher Hitchens
#8. Even though I'm English, I've all my life been heavily exposed to American television and culture in general.
Dominic West
#9. Why does there exist a global American entertainment industry, but there isn't an equivalent coming from France or Italy? This is the case simply because the English language opens the whole world to the American cinema.
Andrzej Wajda
#10. Of course I wrote most of the Constitution myself. I remember hesitating for a long time over the US presidential system. But it wouldn't have done - we were too trained in English democracy to sit down under a dictatorship which is what the American system really is.
Eamon De Valera
#11. On our American tour bus, the bunks are a bit taller so that we don't bash our heads. On the English bus, we bash our heads every morning. It's not the best thing to do first thing when you wake up.
Liam Payne
#12. My biggest entertainment in Moscow was to go to the subway and watch people. When American students visited, I watched them; I learned English from them.
Roustam Tariko
#13. He [P.G.Wodehouse] is I believe, the only man living who speaks with equal fluency the American and English languages.
Max Eastman
#14. Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.
Mignon McLaughlin
#16. I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.
Daniel Alarcon
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. I am an American, but a sense of otherness was part of my growing up. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. My mother is Norwegian.
Siri Hustvedt
#20. The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me ... by newspapers and the Bible.
Van Wyck Brooks
#21. I've been working with Spanish, French, some more American, and Japanese directors. And then I realized I have to study English, and that's why I moved to New York two years ago.
Rinko Kikuchi
#22. Lightnin' Hopkins was something of a fixture on the Houston coffee house scene so we were witness to eccentric blues brilliance close up. Then, believe it or not, along came the wave of the English cats like John Mayall, Eric Clapton and the Stones embracing the great American art form - the blues.
Billy Gibbons
#23. There are no English, French, German or American Jews, but only Jews > > >living in England, France, Germany or America.
Chaim Weizmann
#24. It's funny because when I'm outside Australia, I never get to do my Australian accent in anything. It's always a Danish accent or an English accent or an American accent.
Mallory Jansen
#25. For most Native Americans, there's no more offensive name in English. That non-Native folks think they get to measure or decide what offends us is adding insult to injury.
Suzan Shown Harjo
#26. Our everyday language has become encumbered, Germanic, artificial, bureaucratic, inorganic. It may not be exaggerated to say that by now American writers face but two alternatives: write English, or write gobbledygook.
John Lukacs
#27. I love the English language just like I love all American things. But I confess that I don't feel confident using complex sentences or big words, hence my famous minimally expressive style - all the "gees" and laconic answers to interviewers. Most of all, I have developed listening as an art form.
Andy Warhol
#28. I think English punk died in '79 or '80. Maybe '82 at the latest. As far as American punk goes, it wasn't the same as English punk. It wasn't a working-class movement that was protesting the conditions under which this class had to work. I don't think American punk ever died.
Greg Graffin
#29. To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.
Leslie Fiedler
#30. There's still a bit of a problem, in that so many leading English roles are taken by American or French actresses.
Joely Richardson
#31. Clothes, whips, reading material," the customs officer had summarized, in Spanish and English, to the young American. "Just the bare essentials!" Edward Bonshaw
John Irving
#32. The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.
Gore Vidal
#33. Reality is always separate from the ideal; but in Trinidad this fantasy is a form of masochism and is infinitely more cheating than the fantasy which makes the poor delight in films about rich or makes the English singer use and American accent.
V.S. Naipaul
#34. She was in the middle of a city [Nominally a city. It was the size of an English county town, or, translated into American terms, a shopping mall.] at the time.
Terry Pratchett
#35. The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.
S.I. Hayakawa
#36. I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
Diane Wakoski
#37. In standard American English, the word with the most gradations of meaning is probably run. The Random House unabridged dictionary offers one hundred and seventy-eight options, beginning with "to go quickly by moving the legs more rapidly than at a walk" and ending with "melted or liquefied." In
Stephen King
#38. The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.
George Bernard Shaw
#39. 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
#40. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. I believe we are being dishonest with language minority groups if we tell them they can take full part in American life without learning the English language.
S.I. Hayakawa
#45. The title song of David Bowie's 'Young Americans' is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul.
Jon Landau
#46. I quite like American music, like The Fray - I'm a massive fan of them - and The Killers. I also like more acoustic stuff like Ed Sheeran; I like this English songwriter James Morrison and another singer called Ben Howard.
Louis Tomlinson
#47. 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
#48. If you write "judgement" you should also write "colour" and "tyre.
Paul Brians
#49. American audiences are affected by what the English people think.
Chita Rivera
#50. We should not blur the lines between legal and illegal immigrants. Millions of people around the world have gone through the process to come here legally and they followed the rules that required them to pay a fee, learn English, and learn about American history and government.
Ken Calvert
#51. That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.
Roy Blount Jr.
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Our government should speak a common language with the American people - plain English.
Alan Siegel
#55. I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.
Ken Bruen
#56. If Wellington epitomizes the English gentleman, Eisenhower epitomizes the natural American gentleman.
John Keegan
#57. A well known director wouldn't take the chance on casting me for an American role after he discovered that I was English. Some time later, he expressed his regret that he hadn't taken the chance with me.
Marsha Thomason
#58. My American strength coach said he liked me better before I could speak English.
Yao Ming
#59. 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
#60. You're in Ireland the summer after you left college and you're drinking at a pub near the castle where every day bus loads of English and American tourists come to kiss the Blarney Stone.
Chuck Palahniuk
#61. There is a core simplicity to the English language and its American variant, but it's a slippery core.
Stephen King
#62. American politicians do anything for money ... English politicians take the money and won't do anything.
Stephen Leacock
#63. What, then, is this new man, the American? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race, now called Americans, have arisen.
J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur
#64. The true sovereign is not the American president nor the English king, but the Lord of the Second Advent.
Sun Myung Moon
#65. Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.
Leslie Fiedler
#66. I learned English at school, or at least that's how it started. Also, in Holland - as opposed to some other European countries - we don't dub anything, so as a kid growing up, always watching English and American movies in their original language really helped.
Michiel Huisman
#67. We sing in English, not mimicking some American rock singer's accent. That's just pretending to be something you ain't.
Joe Strummer
#68. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
John McWhorter
#69. In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.
Frederick Lenz
#70. Milton was the gold standard of religious poets for English and American scholars. But Milton wrote of Hell and Heaven from above and below, respectively, not from the inside: safer advantages.
Matthew Pearl
#71. He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.
Robert M. Pirsig
#72. 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
#73. Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.
Eudora Welty
#74. 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
