Top 100 Englishmen's Quotes
#1. The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen's lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire.
Winston Churchill
#2. For a long moment, while Brock stood off observing them, Ned and Barley appraised one another as only Englishmen can who are of the same height and class and shape of head.
John Le Carre
#3. One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor.
Marshall McLuhan
#4. They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun ...
They were dressed half for battle, half for tennis or croquet.
Kurt Vonnegut
#5. I was seized on the 8th of June, 1824, in consequence of the war with Bengal and, in company with Dr. Price, three Englishmen, one American, and one Greek, was thrown into the death prison at Ava, where we lay eleven months - nine months in three pairs and two months in five pairs of fetters.
Adoniram Judson
#7. I'm an Englishman. What more can I say?
Alan Sugar
#8. Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought.
William Butler Yeats
#9. Any time a man comes along and says 'Indians' or 'Mexicans' or 'Englishmen' he's bound to be wrong. Each man is a person unto himself, and you'll find good, bad, and indifferent wherever you go.
Louis L'Amour
#10. When a tiger changes his nature, Englishmen will change theirs.
Mahatma Gandhi
#11. I am now in Gibraltar. It is a large place and there does not seem to be room in this letter, in which to express my feelings about Moors in bare legs and six thousand Red-coats and to hear Englishmen speak again.
Richard H. Davis
#12. The scientific study of the vital relationship between infants and their mothers was started by upper-class Englishmen who were torn from their families as young boys to be sent off to boarding schools, where they were raised in regimented same-sex settings.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#13. Fight well," he said distantly, "and remember you are Englishmen!"
"Welshmen," someone intervened. Sir Roger visibly flinched at that and then, without another word, led his three men-at-arms from the church.
Bernard Cornwell
#14. In truth, no men on earth can cheer like Englishmen, who do so rally one another's blood and spirit when they cheer in earnest, that the stir is like the rush of their whole history, with all its standards waving at once, from Saxon Alfred's downwards.
Charles Dickens
#15. The word most consistently used to describe Kim Philby was "charm", that intoxicating, beguiling and occasionally lethal English quality.
Ben Macintyre
#16. But I was no philosopher, and the sun was beginning to let me know that it was the hour when only mad dogs and Englishmen exposed themselves to its rays.
Anne Fortier
#17. Germans, Frenchmen and Englishmen can say of themselves: "I am the state." I cannot say that. In Russia only the people in the Kremlin can say that. All other citizens are nothing more than human material with which they can do all kinds of things.
Vladimir Sorokin
#18. Abortion ... was probably regarded by the average Roman of the later days of Paganism much as Englishmen in the last century regarded convivial excesses, as certainly wrong, but so venial as scarcely to deserve censure.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
#19. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen.
George Bernard Shaw
#20. Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Wilfred Owen
#21. Leave three Englishmen in a room and they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them.
Julian Fellowes
#22. Englishmen never will be slaves; they are free to do whatever the government and public opinion allow them.
George Bernard Shaw
#23. If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?
Pat Buchanan
#24. Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness.
William Bradford
#25. The typical English painting is narrative in character. The English are a nation of diarists.
Neville Weston
#26. But Lord! To see the absurd nature of Englishmen that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange.
Samuel Pepys
#27. Ask any man what nationality he would prefer to be, and ninety nine out of a hundred will tell you that they would prefer to be Englishmen
Cecil Rhodes
#28. The Invitation, To Tom Highes What we can we will be, Honest Englishmen. Do the work that's nearest, Though it's dull at whiles, Helping, when we meet them, Lame dogs over stiles.
Charles Kingsley
#29. Damn it all, it's the first duty of a soldier - it's the first duty of all Englishmen - to be able to tell a good lie in answer to a charge.
Ford Madox Ford
#30. The vicarious policemanship which was the strongest emotion of Englishmen towards another man's muddle, in their case was replaced by the instinct to pass by as discreetly far as possible on the other side.
T.E. Lawrence
#31. I was a terrible dancer. I dance like an Englishman.
John Cleese
#32. Some persons have ventured to say that it is only since Englishmen ceased to believe in the Bible that they began to discover how beautiful it was.
Lafcadio Hearn
#33. Malcolm Muggeridge who said that the only real Englishmen left in the world were to be found in India.
Ruskin Bond
#35. Englishmen have a genius for looking uncomfortable. Their feelings are terribly mixed up with their personal appearance.
Sara Jeannette Duncan
#36. Whenever possible, Gowan Stoughton of Craigievar, Duke of Kinross, Chief of Clan MacAulay,
avoided rooms crowded with Englishmen. They were all babbling gossips with more earwax than
brains, as his father was wont to say.
Though Shakespeare had got there first.
Eloisa James
#37. Since the French Revolution Englishmen are all intermeasurable one by another, certainly a happy state of agreement to which I forone do not agree.
William Blake
#38. All Englishmen talk as if they've got a bushel of plums stuck in their throats, and then after swallowing them get constipated from the pips.
W.C. Fields
#39. Louise de Keroualle, being a Frenchwoman from the French court, was feared by most Englishmen for how she might influence their king, and that fear quickly turned to hatred.
Susan Holloway Scott
#40. Non-co-operation is a movement intended to invite Englishmen to co-operate with us on honourable terms or retire from our land.
Mahatma Gandhi
#41. He belonged to that inarticulate order of young Englishmen who dislike any form of emotion, and who find it peculiarly hard to explain their mental processes in words.
Agatha Christie
#42. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun.
Noel Coward
#43. For us, sons of France, political sentiment is a passion; while, for the Englishmen, politics are a question of business.
Wilfrid Laurier
#44. You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer," said Miss Pross, in her breathing. "Nevertheless, you shall not get the better of me. I am an Englishwoman.
Charles Dickens
#45. In dealing with Englishmen you can be sure of one thing only, that the logical solution will not be adopted.
William Ralph Inge
#46. I've written so many songs about Englishmen, I have to go elsewhere.
Ray Davies
#47. [The] prevailing reason at this time is, that the Act of Parliament is against the Magna Charta, and the natural rights of Englishmen, and therefore, according to Lord Coke, null and void.
Thomas Hutchinson
#48. You have not yet discovered what happens to Russians at sea.'
'The same thing, I suppose, that happens to Englishmen,' Chancellor said. 'Scots, I take it, are immune.'
'To sarcasm, yes,' Lymond said.
Dorothy Dunnett
#49. The prejudice of Englishmen, in favour of their own government by king, lords and commons, arises as much or more from national pride than reason.
Thomas Paine
#50. Yes, thank God. With a little subterfuge I managed to smuggle him back under my roof where he belongs. He is resting comfortably right now, and I am on cloud ten because cloud nine was full of pompous Englishmen. Wasn't my scene.
Tiffany Reisz
#51. I don't hold it against you that you turned out Irish, either. I wasn't there to make Englishmen of you, and so it's Irish you are, by default.
Neal Stephenson
#52. The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.
William Blake
#53. 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
#54. That Englishman who came to challenge me three or four months ago, and whom I killed to stop him bothering me
Alexandre Dumas
#55. I appeal to all Britishers to answer this call to arms for the defence of all the principles that we Englishmen have been the first to proclaim in the world.
John Amery
#56. For my own part, I do not want the freedom of India if it means extinction of English or the disappearance of Englishmen.
Mahatma Gandhi
#57. I should add that there are undoubtedly charming Englishmen; I have often met them. But they are rarely our fellow-guests at hotels.
Guy De Maupassant
#58. The Englishmen is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.
George Bernard Shaw
#59. Englishmen learn Christ's law best in English. Moses heard God's law in his own tongue; so did Christ's apostles.
John Wycliffe
#60. A spirit, breathing the language of independence, is natural to Englishmen, few of whom are disposed to brook compulsion, or submit to the dictates of others, when not softened by reason, or tempered with kindness.
Joseph Lancaster
#61. IT IS A MISTAKE to suppose that all men, or at least all Englishmen, want to be free. On the contrary, if freedom entails responsibility, many of them want none of it. They would happily exchange their liberty for a modest (if illusory) security.
Theodore Dalrymple
#62. It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.
Samuel Johnson
#63. Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.
George Bernard Shaw
#64. In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew. Is your God an Englishman or an American?
Maurice Samuel
#65. He cursed himself for having assumed the weather would be sunny. Perhaps it was the result of evolution, he thought
some adaptive gene that allowed the English to go on making blithe outdoor plans in the face of almost certain rain.
Helen Simonson
#66. Englishmen are not usually softened by appeals to the memory of their mothers.
Rudyard Kipling
#67. Sherry ... a silly, sickly compound, the use of which will transform a nation, however bold and warlike by nature, into a race of sketchers, scribblers, and punsters, in fact into what Englishmen are at the present day.
George Henry Borrow
#68. Italianate Englishmen are incarnate devils ... for they first lustfully condemn God, then scornfully mock his word, and also spitefully hate and hurt all the well wishers thereof ... They count as fables the holy mysteries of religion.
Roger Ascham
#69. Englishmen are so odd. They are like a nest of Chinese boxes. It takes a very long time to get to the centre of them. When one gets there the result is unrewarding, but the process is instructive and entertaining.
Ian Fleming
#70. I have no intention of watching undersized Englishmen perched on horses with matchstick legs race along courses planned to amuse Nell Gwynn.
Gilbert Harding
#71. You Englishmen,' said Herr Wurter. 'You are all the same. Wherever you are you behave as if you were at home and your word was law.
Derek Raymond
#72. This war proceeds along its terrible path by the slaughter of infantry ... I say to myself every day. What is going on while we sit here, while we go away to dinner or home to bed? Nearly, 1000 - Englishmen, Britishers, and the other is America ... Everything else is swept away.
Winston Churchill
#73. John Locke invented common sense, and only Englishmen have had it ever since!
Bertrand Russell
#74. Englishmen are said to love their laws; - that is the reason, I suppose, they give us so many of them, and in different editions.
Anna Letitia Barbauld
#75. You are Englishmen; mind your privileges, give not away your right.
William Penn
#76. He was just one of those Englishmen who was always saying silly things to sound less pompous, and pompous things to sound less silly.
Edward St. Aubyn
#77. Tennis was a game invented by a woman named Samantha Tennis in 1839, in the village of Lobsworth, County of Kent, as a diversion for the wealthy and titled Englishmen of the region, who had nothing better to do at the time but drink, belch and wear funny clothes.
Dan Jenkins
#78. Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.
P.G. Wodehouse
#79. Englishmen do like to get in a dress, any excuse.
Noel Fielding
#80. It had always been a notion of mine that sanity is like a clearing in the jungle where the humans agree to meet from time to time and behave in certain fixed ways that even a baboon could master, like Englishmen dressing for dinner in the tropics.
Wilfrid
#81. We are showing that Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit, fighting it out to the end.
Robert Falcon Scott
#82. In these latter days, knighthood was an honor few Englishmen escaped.
Arthur C. Clarke
#83. Old England is our home, and Englishmen are we; Our tongue is known in every clime, our flag in every sea.
Mary Howitt
#84. This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak - the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.
Joseph Conrad
#85. in which great difficulties are found to the present day by Englishmen, whose language presents no certain laws for rendering any given sound into a fixed combination of letters.
James Cook
#86. An Englishman is content to say nothing when he has nothing to say.
Samuel Johnson
#87. I think the French have a romantic cliche that Englishmen have great style, great music, irony and sense of humour. Well, sometimes cliches are true.
Josephine De La Baume
#89. Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
Anne Fadiman
#90. They sat in an awkward, embarrassed silence for a moment, the way Englishmen are apt to do after sharing private thoughts.
Daniel Silva
#91. Not only England, but every Englishman is an island.
Novalis
#92. Englishmen did not speak to strangers on trains ...
Ken Follett
#93. Because I am an Englishman I spent most of my life in a state of embarrassment.
Colin Firth
#94. If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?
Julian Barnes
#95. Haydon was more than his model, he was his inspiration, the torch-bearer of a certain kind of English calling which - for the very reason that it was vague and understated and elusive - had made sense of Guillam's life till now.
John Le Carre
#96. 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
#97. He was one of that great class of Englishmen who love their wives and trust them unquestioningly with their money and their honour, but are apt to hedge a little over their motor-cars.
Nevil Shute
#98. The rights of Englishmen are derived from God, not from king or Parliament, and would be secured by the study of history, law, and tradition.
John Adams
#99. The characteristic virtue of Englishmen is power of sustained practical activity and their characteristic vice a reluctance to test the quality of that activity by reference to principles.
R. H. Tawney
#100. Window-breaking, when Englishmen do it, is regarded as honest expression of political opinion. Window-breaking, when Englishwomen do it, is treated as a crime.
Emmeline Pankhurst
