Top 47 Modern English Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Is it surprising that modern English land law should resemble a chaos rather than a system?
Edward Jenks
#3. Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.
Pete Townshend
#4. I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days.
Geraldine Brooks
#5. It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.
Rebecca West
#6. I believe it is imperative to see modern English grammar as a rich and diverse linguistic system deposited on our [England's] shores 1,500 years ago, and left with us unweakened, though substantially changed by the social and political events of the intervening period.
Robert Burchfield
#7. Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.
Terry Pratchett
#8. Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to
avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness
to expand.
Mark Abley
#9. At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.
Wilbur Smith
#10. You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.
John Ruskin
#11. English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.
James Fenton
#12. Few words in any language carry such a load of meaning as 'honor.' It is an old word, unchanged even in its spelling from classical Latin to modern English. Spoken or written, it does not seem to require much explanation; most people think they know what it means.
Edmund Morgan
#13. 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
#14. I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.
J.G. Ballard
#15. What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.
'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment.
Natasha Pulley
#16. The characteristic merit of the English constitutions is, that its dignified parts are very complicated and somewhat imposing, very old and rather venerable, while its efficient part, at least when in great and critical action, is decidedly simple and modern.
Walter Bagehot
#17. I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.
Martin Amis
#18. Although the Irish language is connected with the many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual decline of the Irish language.
Daniel O'Connell
#19. Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas.
Steven Pinker
#20. I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#21. In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.
W. H. Auden
#22. We depend on various cultural forms-the syntax and semantics of English, the deliverances of modern astronomy-to know that the earth is round, but this in no way jeopardizes the objective circularity of the planet.
Douglas Groothuis
#23. I was at university and I was studying modern drama and studying English, and I just was like, 'I don't wanna be in this place. I wanna be acting.'
Melanie Lynskey
#24. Like all other modern people, the English are in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, 'coordinated'. But the pull of their impulses is in the other direction,
George Orwell
#25. You're very good. Are you a professional artist?"
"I dabble," she said.
Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National gallery or the Tate Modern.
Neil Gaiman
#26. I was never particularly academic, so it was no great surprise when I failed my 11-plus and consequently went to Wibsey Secondary Modern. I did all right in English, history and music, which were the subjects that most interested me.
Kiki Dee
#27. Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one.
Henry David Thoreau
#28. The young specialist in English Lit, ... lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.
Isaac Asimov
#29. Incidentally, although the Cistercians did much to improve the quality of sheep, the animal remained much smaller than its modern descendants; as late as the early eighteenth century a sheep wasn't much bulkier than a Labrador Dog.
Clarissa Dickson Wright
#30. The modern haematologist, instead of describing in English what he can see, prefers to describe in Greek what he can't.
Richard Asher
#31. Her English was sweet, an effort for her, anachronistic and unpractised.
Ruth Ahmed
#32. 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
#33. The gh at the end of many modern words, however, like dough, cough, and trough, is actually an artifact not of Dutch orthographic tendencies, but of Norman distaste for the Middle English letter yogh, which looked like this: 3. Yogh fell out of use around the end of the fifteenth century.
David Wolman
#34. I believe in some parts of Nietzsche,
I prefer to read him in sections;
In my heart of hearts I suspect him
of being the one modern christian;
Take notice I never have read him
except in English selections.
Ezra Pound
#35. Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W.S. Merwin
#36. Anna, like most English speakers, thought GASP was a silly name for the project. But the name got the point across. If there were modern wonders of the world, GASP - and Kali - stood as far above them as the Colossus of Rhodes had stood above man.
A. Ashley Straker
#37. All of which suggested literary translation, and Korean seemed a good bet - barely anything available in English, yet it was a modern, developed country, so the work had to be out there, plus the rarity would make it both easier to secure a student grant and more of a niche when it came to work.
Deborah Smith
#38. Absolutely, but let me qualify that-I consider myself an authentic feminist. Not as defined by the modern movement. And, let me clarify that a little bit more. I was an English major, so break it down: -ist means one who celebrates. As a feminist, I celebrate my femininity.
Christine O'Donnell
#39. The present Anglo-German war is then of symbolic significance. In defending modern civilisation against German nihilism, the English are defending the eternal principles of civilisation.
Leo Strauss
#41. There is a certain ancient civility about tailors that is welcome - especially in modern London, which is now very much an international city, not an English city. They're still a little vessel of Englishness in what is otherwise a pretty rambunctious place.
Graydon Carter
#42. The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Robert Morgan
#43. I think Lucy Ferry, now Birley, is absolutely beautiful. She's a modern girl, but she moves beautifully. Amanda [Harlech] moves beautifully when she's not working. All those English leftover society girls.
Manolo Blahnik
#44. I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.
Sally Kirkland
#45. I think most of the world would like to be Scottish. All the Americans who come here never look for English blood or Welsh, only for Scottish and Irish. It's understandable. The Scots effectively created the face of the modern world: the railways, the bridges, the tunnels.
Joanna Lumley
#46. It was not long before English Law took the one step needed to produce the modern scheme of legal remedies. And when it did, it used the Writ of Trespass as the starting point.
Edward Jenks
#47. It's more than usually possible that I won't do a play again. But Skylight is one of the great plays in the English language. I was lucky enough to be a part of it at one point in its life, and it's a timely thing to deliver it again in the modern world.
Bill Nighy
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