Quotes About English

#1. Yeah. Calm down. Two of the most useless words in the English language.

Lili St. Crow

#2. All of these teeth had once been in real, live people. They had talked and smiled and eaten and sang and cursed and prayed. They had brushed and flossed and died. In English class, we read poems about death, but here, right in front of me was a poem about death too.

Gabrielle Zevin

#3. I'm not a monarchist. But I'm English. And I have an irrational emotion for my country.

Damon Albarn

#4. Wasabi. Now hoiteys. Seriously, you'd think I really didn't know English.

Simone Elkeles

#5. What must the English and French think of the language of our philosophers when we Germans do not understand it ourselves?

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#6. Even today, well-brought-up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth.

Calvin Trillin

#7. Even English Language doesn't provide you with the Synonyms of the word Success.

Kshitij Shringi

#8. 'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!'

Sarah Palin

#9. My English teacher always gave me scripts for plays, but I was into sports. My friend said there were small parts I could go up for, but the director gave me the part of Mozart, which was kind of the lead role. From then on I just loved it.

Santiago Cabrera

#10. I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#11. A gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.

Mark Twain

#12. An English family consists of a few persons, who, from youth to age, are found revolving within a few feet of each other, as if tied by some invisible ligature, tense as that cartilage which we have seen attaching the two Siamese.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#13. That night Ana Iris and I go to a movie. We cannot understand the English but we both like the new theater's clean rugs.

Junot Diaz

#14. German and English firms operate internationally, while French firms do not. The only place where they all have work is in China. Anybody can sell himself in China!

Helmut Jahn

#15. I lived in England for a long time, and even the English didn't think me as one of theirs. In America I'm not really accepted. In New Zealand now, I don't think they even think of me as a New Zealander.

Andrew Niccol

#16. Dreams do come true, even for someone who couldn't speak English and never had a music lesson or much of an education.

Lawrence Welk

#17. Like so many colours, like so many flavours, like so many fragrance, English grammar should be a personal choice.

Megha Khare

#18. Exaggeration is the octopus of the English language

Matthew Pearl

#19. He invented Kung Fu when translated to English means method by which short, bald guys can kick the bejeezus out of you.

Christopher Moore

#20. By my count, of the more than 600 English-language World War II movies made since 1940, only four have even acknowledged the humanity of the soldiers of Nippon. There may be a few I've missed, but not many.

Stephen Hunter

#21. But later when I was a teacher, an English teacher naturally, my students preferred fiction to reality. They were in junior high, and so they preferred ANYTHING to reality.

Richard Peck

#22. The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#23. What English speakers call "computer science" Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik

James Gleick

#24. I yearn for empty thoughts and silence in my head. For someone to sit down beside me, to hold my hand and take away the cold sting of loneliness that creeps under my skin like an English winter.

Malia Zaidi

#25. If you must kill English officials, why not kill me instead?

Mahatma Gandhi

#26. There is no word in English for chic. Why should there be? Everything chic is by legend French. Perhaps everything chic is in reality French.

Elizabeth Hawes

#27. Using the passive voice is always very helpful. Mind you, a lot of that propaganda English emanates from here. The British establishment has always used the passive voice. It's been a weapon of discourse so those who committed terrible acts in the old empire could not be identified.

John Pilger

#28. I'm so disappointed in the frat parties at Columbia. I'm like an English boy going to an American college. I'm thinking cheerleaders, I'm thinking kegs. That's not what's on the cards.

Max Minghella

#29. The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.

Umberto Eco

#30. Eripuit coele fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis," or from Latin to English "He snatched the lightning from the skies and the scepter from the tyrants. Jacques Turgot

Nye

#31. Let us be French, let us be English, but most importantly let us be Canadian!

John A. Macdonald

#32. When the student has her voice under complete control, it is safe to take up the lyric repertoire of Mendelssohn, Old English Songs, etc. How simple and charming they are!

Alma Gluck

#33. My mom and my dad wanted my brother and I to have a better life, you know, better education, better jobs. It was probably harder, much, much harder, for my parents. When you're a kid, you can learn a language much more easily; I learned English in less than a year.

Mila Kunis

#34. There was always a lot of American music in England until, obviously when the Beatles came around, then there was a shift towards English music, but before then American music was the main thing.

John Deacon

#35. I do feel fortunate to have some knowledge of the great Latin American writers, including some that are probably not that well known in English. I'm thinking of Jose Maria Arguedas, whom I read when I was living in Lima, and who really impacted the way I viewed my country.

Daniel Alarcon

#36. In Ireland, I don't get asked out much. English boys are a lot more flirty.

Georgia Salpa

#37. That's why even the simplest, most basic Japanese sentence cannot be translated into English!

Tae Kim

#38. I never knew what language they'd lapse into when fucked - Urdu or Telugu or a mix of both (only the techies came in English).

Manil Suri

#39. I love New York, but I have to admit that I feel very English, and I do miss that sense of history that you have everywhere in Britain.

Charlie Cox

#40. In English, I'm a little bit limited. I speak English as a second language, and that's a little limitation that I have to work around and I have to use it to my favor. So, yes, that's why I end up wanting to do more things in Latin America.

Gael Garcia Bernal

#41. I ended up majoring in English, which I'm not particularly fluent in.

Ellie Kemper

#42. I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.

Azar Nafisi

#43. Nothing in my younger life could have told me I would have needed to know how to speak English.

Omar Sy

#44. several hundred English lived on Tortuga, the westernmost part of the sprawling British Leeward Islands

Colin Woodard

#45. French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French novels about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about many things which the English public would not allow.

Lafcadio Hearn

#46. The country (England) which was called a nation of pirates in the years around 1600 would eventually become the pirates' greatest scourge, not just in English waters but throughout the world.

Peter Earle

#47. I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.

Francis Ford Coppola

#48. It has to be admitted that we English have sex on the brain, which is a very unsatisfactory place to have it.

Malcolm Muggeridge

#49. The American Revolution was, in fact, a battle against the philosophy of Locke and the English utilitarians.

Robert Trout

#50. I think Brits probably feel that Americans are more like us than vice-versa, if that makes sense. Because we get everything American over here in Britain, but yet there are things which are staunchly English that you guys don't have.

Hayley Atwell

#51. After the non-Japanese Carlos Ghosn was brought in by Nissan to turn around the struggling auto manufacturer, he made English the company's official working language.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#52. We were supposed to be an English literature class, but Miss Nesbitt used literature to teach real life. She said she didn't have time to teach us like a regular English teacher
we were too far behind. Instead, she taught us the world through literature.

Phillip M. Hoose

#53. The English language is an arsenal of weapons; if you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or no they are loaded you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time. "Poppycock" means "soft shit" - from the Dutch, I need scarcely remind you, pappe kak.

Stephen Fry

#54. I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.

Ted Dekker

#55. A truly English protest march would see us all chanting: 'What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!

Kate Fox

#56. The Hebrew original does not say, 'Do not kill.' It says, 'Do not murder.' Both Hebrew and English have two words for taking a life - one is 'kill' (harag, in Hebrew) and the other is 'murder' (ratzach in Hebrew).

Dennis Prager

#57. As a practical matter, every immigrant needs to master English to be a full participating citizen and to have full economic opportunity.

Richard Lugar

#58. In English we blame others for not understanding us when really it's our fault for not saying what we wanted to say.

Rory Dunlop

#59. The English know how to make the best of things. Their so-called muddling through is simply skill at dealing with the inevitable.

Winston Churchill

#60. Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the 'Oxford English Dictionary,' has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever.

James Gleick

#61. I don't speak English, so I cannot foresee a career in Hollywood. But I do see myself more and more as an actress rather than a dancer.

Monica Cruz

#62. German football is like English football. The Germans and the English do not play like a Brazilian side. They have to improve, bring up their young players, who have character.

Franz Beckenbauer

#63. My mom has an English accent, so we always referred to the trunk as the 'boot.' And then, suddenly, we moved to Georgia and I would say things like 'open the boot' with a bit of an accent, and I quickly realized I had to adapt; that kind of thing will get you beat up!

Nicole Beharie

#64. I, of course, took the opportunity to interpose with pigheaded Wallace pride, 'I am not English, you ignorant Jerry bastard, I am a SCOT.

Elizabeth Wein

#65. In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I'm going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots.

Neal Stephenson

#66. The English have only three sauces - a white one, a brown one and a yellow one, and none of them have any flavor whatever.

Guy De Maupassant

#67. My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

Margaret Atwood

#68. I suppose you heard him yelling as the doctor set his leg."
"I never knew there were so many rude words in the English language. Or French, German, Italian, Latin,or ... there was another language I didn't quite recognize."
"Greek.

Karen Hawkins

#69. I was an English major in college with minors in Fine Arts and Humanities.

Sue Grafton

#70. English women would rather go out and buy a washing machine than shop for clothes.

Trinny Woodall

#71. The English language is full of words that are just waiting to be misspelled, and the world is full of sticklers, ready to pounce.

Mary Norris

#72. The 'Irish Question' has dogged English politics for four hundred years and will continue to measure out its irresolution in blood and human lives until there is peace in Ireland.

Kevin Toolis

#73. These men of many nations must be taught American ways, the English language, and the right way to live.

Henry Ford

#74. Being 'contented' ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#75. The English countryside is the most staggeringly beautiful place. I can't spend as much time there as I like, but I like everything about it. I like fishing, I like clay- pigeon shooting.

Guy Ritchie

#76. From Fall Irmgard:
"My father preached to me from an early age," Addie said, proudly. "Whether in English or in French, it will be a strong vocabulary and not a strong arm that wins the most battles in one's lifetime!

Rand Charles

#77. Maria looked at the TARDIS ... 'Is that really your carriage?' She asked. 'It is not very good, monsieur. It has no wheels.'
'It doesn't need them,' laughed Amy. 'It's an English carriage. They don't have wheels.
'Does Monsieur Rory push it?'
'When necessary,' laughed Amy.

James Goss

#78. I have a Bachelor of Arts in English, which means I had a lot of formal training in reading.

Kate DiCamillo

#79. The language of God is not English or Latin; the language of God is cellular and molecular.

Timothy Leary

#80. I couldn't even have a guitar. But I got a three-track recorder that was so small that I could take it with me. Then I started recording and writing properly. I recorded lots of voices, not just my own. I was interested in people speaking and singing English and trying out words.

Jenny Hval

#81. A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless ... speciesless.

John Fowles

#82. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during "God Save the King" than stealing from a poor box

George Orwell

#83. I told my nephew that if he wanted to get on in motor racing, the first thing he should do was master English. Thank goodness he now speaks it.

Juan Manuel Fangio

#84. It's how the English run their courts. They sacrifice innocents, thinking to keep evil at bay, and call it a kind of justice. But they are no more just than this pole is a man.

Kathleen Kent

#85. Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.

Glen Duncan

#86. 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

#87. I planned on being an English teacher, but I don't know where that went.

John Krasinski

#88. People think for Shakespeare you have to have a big English accent, but it's not true. He designed it so it can be performed in any accent in any time period.

Vinny Guadagnino

#89. Cited by the author of 'Lucky Jim' as one of the most dismal depressing questions in the English language: Shall we go straight in?

Kingsley Amis

#90. My parents are both English. My dad is a plastic surgeon - his name's Norman Waterhouse, but we call him Normy. And my mom's a nurse, which is how they met - in a hospital, over decaying bone.

Suki Waterhouse

#91. Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.

Robert Graves

#92. A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread.

David Crystal

#93. Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.

John McWhorter

#94. Many Arabic/Islamic words have now entered the English dictionary, such as haj, hijab, Eid, etc., and I no longer need to put them in italics or explain them.

Leila Aboulela

#95. Most English houses, grand or small, nestle in an intimate pastoral setting.

Nicholas Haslam

#96. The English criminal code, later known as the "Bloody Code," was brutal in the late 18th century. By the time the first legal reforms were enacted in 1826, 220 crimes - many of them relatively petty crimes against property as Dickens describes in the rest of the paragraph - were punishable by death.

Susanne Alleyn

#97. Of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the

Charles Dickens

#98. For Henry James, class was 'the essentially hierarchial plan of English society' which was 'the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a stranger; there is hardly a detail of life that does not in some degree betray it'.

David Cannadine

#99. In the mind of The English, kissing in the rain, as well as other public displays of affection, belongs to the category of soft porn. Sane people don't do soft porn in public. Only animals do. And aliens.

Angela Kiss

#100. I'm sure that a U.S. citizen, if I try to sing in English, he can feel that I'm not really sincere, there is something wrong. And I'm sure that even in French, they could feel the sincerity more than in English.

Stromae