Top 100 English's Quotes
#1. The late twentieth century has been the locus of a new lurch on English's time line in America, where oratorical, poetic, and compositional craft of a rigorously exacting nature has been cast to the margins of the culture.
John McWhorter
#2. It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.
Billy Collins
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.
Jo Walton
#6. Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#7. And in repose one might have admired so fine a specimen of English manhood, until the foppish ways, the affected movements, the perpetual inane laugh, brought one's admiration of Sir Percy Blakeney to an abrupt close.
Emmuska Orczy
#8. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!
Mary Gordon
#9. If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.
George Orwell
#10. 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
#11. When I moved to London at age 16, tired of the shuffle around other people's houses and ready to live on my own, I met my English brother and sister, who instantly claimed me as family.
Allegra Huston
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what's the world coming to, eh?
Dorothy L. Sayers
#18. Readers have told me that their children have learned to read after years of struggle after starting to read Garfield's comic strip and many people who have moved to the United States have said that they, too, learned English by reading Garfield.
Jim Davis
#19. John Mitchel's famous declaration that God sent the blight but the English created the Famine.
Tim Pat Coogan
#20. I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.
Lara Pulver
#21. 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
#22. The very notion of Great Britain's "greatness" is bound up with Empire,' the cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, once wrote: 'Euro-scepticism and littel Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood , and rotted English teeth.
Andrea Levy
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.
Roy Blount Jr.
#26. In Mexico we have a trick - add a crystal of salt to the kettle and the tea tastes better, almost English. But after four pots, your kettle's broken.
Gael Garcia Bernal
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Films about the English monarchy, they tend to have a lavishness, sumptuous imagery, it's all very posh and rich.
Tom Hooper
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Where's our teacher?"
"Probably getting it on with the English teacher."
- Alex Gold and Mike Wilson
R.J. Morse, R.J. Brookes
#33. the moment he'd seen that female he'd forgotten his own name, most of his English vocabulary, and seventy-five percent of his sense of balance.
Instant. Cosmic. Attraction.
-Trez's thoughts about Selena
J.R. Ward
#34. 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
#35. To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.
Bill Bryson
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 'Othello' was my first Shakespearean discovery. I was obsessed with drama at school, and I studied the play for my English GCSE. Desdemona is the part that everyone wants, but Iago's wife Emilia is the one I've always been drawn to.
Michelle Dockery
#39. [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
#40. Being blonde means people decide on sight that you are much prettier and nicer than you really are, just as Americans automatically add 10 points to someone's IQ when they hear an English accent. Fact.
Rachel Johnson
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Below these words was the garden's name in English: EVENING MISTS. I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.
Tan Twan Eng
#48. [About John Evershed] There is much in our medallist's career which is a reminder of the scientific life of Sir William Huggins. They come from the same English neighbourhood and began as amateurs of the best kind. They both possess the same kind of scientific aptitude.
Hugh Newall
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. In English we say 'we are' but it's proper to say 'we are becoming' because things are becoming.
Nhat Hanh
#57. Burnside left even sooner, hard on the heels of a violent argument with Meade, an exchange of recriminations which a staff observer said went far toward confirming one's belief in the wealth and flexibility of the English language as a medium of personal dispute.
Shelby Foote
#58. 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
#59. But what is worse than all," observed the English traveler Isaac Weld, "these wretches in their combat endeavor to their utmost to tear out each other's testicles."31
Gordon S. Wood
#60. You'll be so busy with Bridge and what's-his-name that you'll forget all about your English mate, St. Clair."
"Ha! So you are English!" I poke him in the stomach.
He grabs my hand and we wrestle, laughing. "I claim ... no ... nationality.
Stephanie Perkins
#62. Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world's brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays.
Terry Teachout
#63. The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
Adam Gopnik
#64. 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
#65. English wine is like Belgian rock or German disco: a waste of everyone's time and money.
Jay Rayner
#66. Radio in England is nonexistent. It's very bad English use of a media system, typically English use.
David Bowie
#67. 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
#68. Sometimes, when she's out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language.
T.C. Boyle
#69. 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
#70. His kisses were so mind-numbing that when Blake said, "Car door," it took Livia a few seconds to remember she spoke English.
"Dad. Oh. My dad's home.
Debra Anastasia
#71. The craziest part of being on tour is being overseas and having crazed fans so far away from home. They don't speak English, but they still know the lyrics. That's a trip.
Tinashe
#72. Frieda, you despise English music. You know you do. And English art. And English literature, except Shakespeare, and he's a German.
E. M. Forster
#73. No one's going to be able to operate without a grounding in the basic sciences. Language would be helpful, although English is becoming increasingly international. And travel. You have to have a global attitude.
Rupert Murdoch
#74. If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell 'friend,' I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend.
Richard P. Feynman
#75. 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
#76. The English love an insult. It's their only test of a man's sincerity.
Benjamin Franklin
#77. stole the ambrosia of the gods and was cursed by Zeus to be trapped forever between a bountiful fruit tree and a pool of water. Whenever he tries to eat, the branches rise away. When he tries to drink, the water recedes. It's the source of the English word tantalize.
Yudhi Raman
#78. There's a melody in everything. And once you find the melody, then you connect immediately with the heart. Because sometimes English or Spanish, Swahili or any language gets in the way. But nothing penetrates the heart faster than the melody.
Carlos Santana
#79. From what I've read, everyone has a claim on Merlin. Was he Scottish, Welsh, English or even French? All these countries have got a big claim on him and Camelot. That's why the Arthurian legends are so popular - because they are such good stories.
Colin Morgan
#80. It's important that top clubs don't lose sight of the fact that it's the English Premier League and English players should be involved.
Alan Pardew
#81. 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
#82. There's a word for this in English," he mused, still soft. "I can't recall it. I've made you a ... a fallen women. Yes?"
"Yes," I agreed, still smiling. "Thank you ever so much."
"It's been entirely my pleasure," he said in Romanian, and I turned my face into his sleeve and began to laugh.
Shana Abe
#83. Cure is one of the most precious words in the English language. It's a short word. A clean and simple word. But it isn't so easy a thing as it sounds. There are questions like: How will this affect us in ten years? In twenty? What will it do to our children? Our children's children?
Lauren DeStefano
#84. Irish folk is probably the biggest influence musically that I've ever had. My mother's Irish. And when I was very young, both my brothers were very into traditional music, English and Irish. They were always playing music, so I was always brought up with it.
Kate Bush
#85. Meet Matt. He's the new 'it' guy. He's from a foreign country, doesn't speak English, and the ladies can't keep their eyes off of him." "Dude. I'm from Canada." Matt sighed.
Brittainy C. Cherry
#86. I'm English and, as such, I crave disappointment. That's why I buy Kinder Surprise.
Bill Bailey
#87. My style of singing has always been referred to 'soul' singing when it fact it's more influenced by English R&B Blues Shouting. I'm closer to Led Zeppelin as a vocalist than to Ella Fitzgerald. It was torture dealing with major labels.
Alison Moyet
#88. It's funny how a film about a murderous old English toff can help you.
Jim Broadbent
#89. We sing in English, not mimicking some American rock singer's accent. That's just pretending to be something you ain't.
Joe Strummer
#90. If you could pick one word in the English language to describe the universe, what would it be? Why?"
Here's my response:
Unfair.
Jordan Sonnenblick
#91. China's cinema has been rising for some time; it has more exposure, so my chances of becoming internationally known are better. But the first thing I have to do is learn English. If I can grasp the language, then perhaps I can think about the U.S.
Ziyi Zhang
#92. I'm English. I can't accept happiness that easily. There's got to be a trick in there somewhere.
David Bowie
#93. During his weekly address to the nation, President Obama discussed higher education and said, 'The most important skill you can sell is your knowledge.' Or as English majors working at Starbucks put it, 'No it's not.'
Jimmy Fallon
#94. English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it's just as bad as it is anywhere.
John Cleese
#95. I really believe amendment " to make English our common and unifying language" is racist. I think it's directed basically to people who speak Spanish.
Ruben Aguilar
#96. That's how it is with the English: if you score against them you're a good player; if you don't, you're not.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic
#97. I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition of who I am. Then there's Italian, this strange, other component of me that I've just created. It was a creative process just to learn the language, never mind to start expressing myself in it.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#98. MasterChef Junior for me was about working closely with these kids and getting them to reeducate their parents to understand that food is as important educationally as Math and English and it's important that we don't take it for granted.
Gordon Ramsay
#99. There's no nation under the sun can beat the English for ill-politeness: for my part, I hate the very sight of them; and so I shall only just visit a person of quality or two of my particular acquaintance, and then I shall go back again to France.
Fanny Burney
#100. My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.
Ted Cruz
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