Top 100 Englishman's Quotes
#1. The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.
Matthew Arnold
#2. When mighty roast beef was the Englishman's food It ennobled our hearts and enriched our blood
Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good. Oh! the roast beef of England. And Old England's roast beef.
Henry Fielding
#3. From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
Willa Cather
#4. Indeed, the Englishman's history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.
Henry David Thoreau
#5. [Tessa] knew about phantom limbs [....] Her cheek, where the Englishman's fingers had been, did not exactly ache ... but very strangely, most curiously ... it felt.
Eva Ibbotson
#6. If you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman's pleasures can be, and mostly are, shared by his dog.
George Bernard Shaw
#7. An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him.
Alan Jay Lerner
#8. A True Born Englishman's a contradiction!
In speech and irony, in fact a fiction
Daniel Defoe
#9. Bottled, was he?" Said Colonel Bantry, with an Englishman's sympathy for alcoholic excess. "Oh, well, can't judge a fellow by what he does when he's drunk? When I was at Cambridge, I remember I put a certain utensil - well - well, nevermind.
Agatha Christie
#10. I think some orator commenting upon that fate said that though the winds of heaven might whistle around an Englishman's cottage, the King of England could not.
John James Ingalls
#11. Life isn't all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman's education.
Thomas Hughes
#12. That part of the Englishman's nature which has found gratification in religion is now drifting into political life.
Beatrice Webb
#14. The Englishman's approach to vulgarity is so clumsy that it makes it seem dirtier than it really is, but the Frenchman lifts it with a light, dexterous touch onto a plane of inimitable humour. To go to bed with Balzac is to know what one has missed all one's life.
Jean Lucey Pratt
#15. The fraudulent electrical utility company in conjunction with the corrupt sheriff taught me that an Englishman's home is not his castle
Steven Magee
#16. An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue
Henry James
#17. You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.
William Butler Yeats
#18. The scene he witnessed there in the twilight depths of the African jungle was burned forever into the Englishman's brain.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#19. Athos was delighted to find he was going to fight an Englishman. We might say that was his dream.
Alexandre Dumas
#20. I question whether any Turk, of all that have entered the Paradise of Opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had. But, indeed, I hounour the barbarians too much by supposing them capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an Englishman.
Thomas De Quincey
#21. There is no second country for an Englishman, except a ship and the sea.
Madame De Stael
#22. When you arrive in L.A. as an Englishman, you might as well be on the moon. People just don't understand you if you speak too fast, and most people there think you're Australian. Ordering was incredibly complicated. I was speechless.
Ben Chaplin
#23. Some Englishman once said marriage is a long dull meak with pudding served first
Julian Barnes
#24. The reason why Englishmen are the best husbands in the world is because they want to be faithful. A Frenchman or an Italian will wake up in the morning and wonder what girl he will meet. An Englishman wakes up and wonders what the cricket score is.
Barbara Cartland
#25. It is a thing which every sensible American should learn from every sensible Englishman, that glare and glitter, gimcracks and gewgaws, are not indispensable to domestic solacement.
Herman Melville
#26. 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
#27. An Englishman once said that he found it easier to be a member of a club than of the human race because the bylaws were shorter, and he knew all the members personally. That sounds about right.
Nelson DeMille
#28. The average Englishman has no idea of the dynamism in the music scene here.
Kabir Bedi
#29. It is good to be on your guard against an Englishman who speaks French perfectly; he is very likely to be a card-sharper or an attache in the diplomatic service.
W. Somerset Maugham
#30. By the way, whenever an Englishman would cry 'All right!' an American cries 'Go ahead!' which is somewhat expressive of the national character of the two countries.
Charles Dickens
#31. I remember when I saw 'X-Men' the first time, I was living in England as an exchange student, and my first boyfriend, who's an Englishman, made me watch the movie ... He was very jealous that I liked Hugh Jackman so much.
Tao Okamoto
#32. The Englishman never enjoys himself except for a noble purpose.
A.P. Herbert
#33. In Soviet thinking the concept of economy of force has little place. Whereas to an Englishman the taking of a sledgehammer to crack a nut is a wrong decision and a sign of mental immaturity ... in Russian eyes the cracking of nuts is clearly what sledgehammers are for.
Max Hastings
#35. We will never have Fascism in England; no Englishman will dress up, not even for a revolution.
William Bolitho
#36. There is no one better than a good Englishman and no one worse than a bad one. I have observed you. I think you are a good one. Mr Pine, do you know Richard Roper?
John Le Carre
#37. My favourite novel is Frederick Forsythe's Day Of The Jackal, the story about the unproven case of this apparent Englishman who was hired to assassinate De Gaulle....
Charles Kennedy
#38. Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.
Evelyn Waugh
#39. The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.
Katharine Hepburn
#40. It doesn't matter, really, does it, sweet'art?" he said, still smiling lazily. "Not after what's 'appened already. What's once more, eh? And I'm an Englishman, too," he coaxed. "Not a filthy Scot.
Diana Gabaldon
#41. The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.
Michael Ondaatje
#42. Never, and by this I mean never, criticise the English weather. Especially if you're an alien. For an English woman, it's as though you are scolding her first born child. For an Englishman, it's as if you are criticising the size of his penis. Or even worse: his football team.
Angela Kiss
#43. In reality, France's American territory extended to the west as far as a Frenchman could go without getting shot by a Spaniard, and likewise to the north without getting shot by an Englishman.
Mark Stein
#44. Emeric [Pressburger] was completely cosmopolitan. That's what makes their [with Michael Powell] films so special. Neither of them thought twice about making a film about a friendship between an Englishman and a German during the Blitz. They were genius.
Thelma Schoonmaker
#45. ... if the Englishman does not disclose his soul, he readily opens his home. A Frenchman may reveal his life secrets after half an hour's aquaintance. But he does not ask one home.
Gustaaf Johannes Renier
#46. Wherever God erects a house of prayer
the Devil always builds a chapel there;
And t'will be found, upon examination,
the latter has the largest congregation.
- Defoe's The True-Born Englishman, 1701
Daniel Defoe
#47. Fee, fie, foe, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread." Ballimore shook her head. "Nonsense, dear. It's just Princess Cimorene and the King of the Enchanted Forest." "And neither of us is English," Cimorene added. The
Patricia C. Wrede
#48. Frank made a face; an Englishman to the bone, he would rather lap water out of the toilet than drink tea made from teabags. The Lipton's had been left by Mrs. Grossman, the weekly cleaning woman, who thought tea made from loose leaves messy and disgusting.
Diana Gabaldon
#49. The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
John Updike
#50. Silence can be defined as conversation with an Englishman
Heinrich Heine
#51. 'English fair play' is a fine expression. It justifies the bashing of the puny draper's assistant by the big hairy blacksmith, and this to the perfect satisfaction of both parties, if they are worthy the name of Englishman.
Joseph Furphy
#52. In his mind he vaguely pondered whether he should strike that long-legged Englishman in the face and call him a coward, or whether such conduct in a lady's presence might be deemed ungentlemanly, when Marguerite happily interposed.
Emmuska Orczy
#53. In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the 'inner ring', the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join.
Ben Macintyre
#54. This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet.
Henry David Thoreau
#55. If "Manners maketh man," as someone said
Then he's the hero of the day
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself, no matter what they say."
(Englishman in New York)
Sting
#56. 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
#59. I think it impossible, utterly impossible, for any Englishman to live here [in America], and be happy.
Charles Dickens
#60. Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?
Jeanette Winterson
#61. An Englishman does not joke about such an important matter as a bet.
Jules Verne
#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
#64. I am going to have a cup of tea, like any good Englishman.
Brian Jones
#65. Each religious sect has its own physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a face; the Quakers, a face; the nuns, a face. An Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his manners.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#66. An Englishman is never afraid of being laughed at. He just thinks the other fellow is a fool. But Americans still can't risk anybody laughing at them.
Pearl S. Buck
#67. I'm French. I have not become an Englishman. I have the impression of living on an island called Arsenal. If you fancy a sightseeing tour of London, don't ask me. You would get lost.
Arsene Wenger
#68. An Englishman, being flattered, is a lamb; threatened, a lion.
George Chapman
#69. You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.
Evelyn Waugh
#70. The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being, the American wants to be considered a good guy.
Louis Kronenberger
#71. Who says Australia offers not a home for every poor Englishman, or any other countryman that finds his way to our shores? And what sort of thanks do we get for it?
Henry Lawson
#72. The manager swiftly overtook him, sliding effortlessly past the skinny Englishman, with the practiced ease of someone used to slinking around ailing, despotic monarchs.
Tom Vater
#73. Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#74. Put an Englishman into the garden of Eden, and he would find fault with the whole blasted concern; put a Yankee in, and he would see where he could alter it to advantage; put an Irishman in, and he would want to boss the thing; put a Dutchman in, and he would proceed to plant it.
Josh Billings
#75. In this case it appealed to me partly because it felt close to me in some ways. This is about a confused, bewildered middle class Englishman adrift in smalltown America and that has definitely been me.
Colin Firth
#76. New York cops are very specific in terms of the way they talk and the way they handle themselves. All these cliches that, as an Englishman, I thought were from a bygone era or were a bit of poetic license with cop shows - the more you hang out with them, the more you realize how real that jargon is.
Theo James
#77. If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#78. the English explorer Richard Burton told the story of an Englishman finding his new wife unconscious on the marital bed, having chloroformed herself. She had pinned a note to her nightdress which read: 'Mama says you're to do what you like.
Sam Miller
#79. What we call the Irish Brogue is no sooner discovered, than it makes the deliverer, in the last degree, ridiculous and despised; and, from such a mouth, an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders, and follies.
Jonathan Swift
#80. I have always thought it bad manners to let one's fingers stay too long in another man's snuffbox.
Anna Freeman
#81. ...in the old days, silvery bells would often sound just as some Englishman or Englishwoman of particular virtue or beauty was about to be stolen away by fairies to live in strange, ghostly lands for ever.
Susanna Clarke
#82. The Englishman can get along with sex quite perfectly so long as he can pretend that it isn't sex but something else.
James Agate
#83. No! The captain of the guard was that damned Englishman in disguise, and everyone of his soldiers aristos! The
Emmuska Orczy
#84. That Englishman who came to challenge me three or four months ago, and whom I killed to stop him bothering me
Alexandre Dumas
#85. I like to see an angry Englishman," said Poirot. "They are very amusing. The more emotional they feel the less command they have of language.
Agatha Christie
#86. Every Englishman believes that Handel now occupies an important position in heaven. If so, le bon Dieu must feel toward him very much as Louis Treize felt toward Richelieu.
George Bernard Shaw
#87. A Frenchman may possibly be clean; an Englishman is conscientiously clean.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#88. As an Englishman, permit me now to say with what pleasure I learnt of the election of Professor Planck and Professor Stark to the Nobel Prizes for the years 1918 and 1919.
Charles Glover Barkla
#89. Educate the Russian or the American or the Englishman or the Irishman or Frenchman or any real northern European except German, and you get the Anarchist, that is to say the man who dreams of order without organisation - of something beyond organisation ...
H.G.Wells
#90. Or a White Englishman would rather smash a White Frenchman than a Jew! Crazy!
Tom Metzger
#91. I have to think of all the possibilities, doctor. Even a crime of passion is possible.' 'Passion?' the doctor smiled. 'I am an Englishman.
Graham Greene
#92. How superbly brave is the Englishman in the presence of the awfulest forms of danger and death; and how abject in the presence of any and all forms of hereditary rank.
Mark Twain
#93. In the same period that the Americans have lived under one constitution our French friends notched up five. A Punch cartoon has a 19th century Englishman asking a librarian for a copy of the French constitution, only to be told: 'I am sorry Sir, we do not stock periodicals.'
Margaret Thatcher
#94. An Englishman will fairly drink as much As will maintain two families of Dutch.
Daniel Defoe
#95. Man has the supreme knack of deceiving himself; the Englishman is supremest among men.
Mahatma Gandhi
#96. The Englishman, be it noted, seldom resorts to violence; when he is sufficiently goaded he simply opens up, like the oyster, and devours his adversary.
Henry Miller
#97. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?
Kurt Vonnegut
#98. Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.
George Bernard Shaw
#99. In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew. Is your God an Englishman or an American?
Maurice Samuel
#100. He thought of the Englishman at the bar in the lobby again. That's what had brought it all back - the Englishman remarking to the bartender that he'd just come from New Orleans, and that certainly was a haunted city.
Anne Rice
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