Top 100 Quotes About English
#1. If Wellington epitomizes the English gentleman, Eisenhower epitomizes the natural American gentleman.
John Keegan
#2. If something goes wrong at the plant, blame the guy who can't speak English.
Dan Castellaneta
#3. It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.
Billy Collins
#4. And then the critics, going back to the novels of his maturity, found that their English had a nervous, racy vigour that eminently suited the matter.
W. Somerset Maugham
#5. 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
#6. My first restoration was on 'Napoleon,' trying to put the French version in with the English version, and it was most unsatisfactory.
Kevin Brownlow
#7. My scary strange English shall only be counted as my English problem.
M.F. Moonzajer
#8. My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that.
Freeman A. Hrabowski III
#9. I wasn't saying you were heartbroken." I sound like English is a new language for me, the way I stutter out the words. "I just meant it was hard for me to ... to watch."
He neither confirms nor denies that he might or might not have been even a teeny bit heartbroken.
Susan Ee
#10. The expression Jake saw on all the faces, oldest to youngest, was the same: pure joy. Not just that, he thought, and remembered a phrase his English teacher had used about how some books make us feel: the ecstasy of perfect recognition.
Stephen King
#11. 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
#12. I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.
James Joyce
#13. I was born in Santa Monica but brought up abroad so I don't use English much.
Geraldine Chaplin
#14. When I couldn't speak English, I loved silent films circa 1914-1929, Abel Gance being my favorite director.
Kola Boof
#15. You know what English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids.
H. Beam Piper
#16. Because this is Upper Canada, after all, and 'caning' sounds more English than 'having ass whipped to death with hickory stick.
Allan Dare Pearce
#17. I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.
Jo Walton
#18. You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can't even speak the same language?
Theresa May
#19. On the basis of this information, it would be possible to argue that if everybody spoke English (or Chinese or Esperanto for that matter) everybody would be at war even more often.
Andrew Dalby
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. What I like about Hollywood is that one can get along by knowing two words of English
SWELL and LOUSY.
Vicki Baum
#23. Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.
Dean Wesley Smith
#24. My love of reading and the English language is something given to me by my parents, and I've passed it on to my children.
Corin Tucker
#25. Sitting here now today, I can forgive a lot of the English people because it only takes a hand full of bad people to do something stupid like that and it can make the whole country look bad.
Marvin Hagler
#26. 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
#27. If you go to France, you have to speakFrench. If you speak in English, no one looks at you. On the one hand we sayEnglish is a global language.
Raj Thackeray
#28. In Hollywood through the 50s, there were black, English, and Middle European housekeepers and maids.
Bill Condon
#29. I beg your pardon; I am drunk without a drink. English wine & words are vulnerable to every man.
Santosh Kalwar
#30. And it occurred to me, standing there, just breathing with her, quiet settling around us, that those might be the three most beautiful words in the English language. We have time.
Ransom Riggs
#31. 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
#32. As an English actress constantly playing Americans, you already had to step way out of your box in that way.
Minnie Driver
#33. On the day of the show, I sit down with someone that speaks very good English and someone who speaks the local language very well and work out what I'm going to say.
Phil Collins
#34. The typical Irish peasant ate about 10 pounds of potatoes each day and soon towered in physical size over their rural English equivalents who mainly ate bread.
Rashers Tierney
#35. For me, even just being English was a whole sort of experience in as much as I'm Australian.
Radha Mitchell
#36. All of our affairs, since the union of crowns, have been managed by the advice of English ministers, and the principal offices of the kingdom filled with such men, as the court of England knew would be subservient to their designs.
Andrew Fletcher
#37. My father was an Episcopal minister, and for 14 years my family lived in China, in a city called Wuchang. We four children spoke Chinese before we spoke English. We left when the communists came, in the early 1930s. I was about 5 years old.
Audrey Meadows
#38. You English are like mad bulls ... you see red everywhere! What on earth has come over you, to heap on us such suspicion as is unworthy of a great nation. I regard this as a personal insult ... You make it uncommonly difficult for a man to remain friendly to England.
Wilhelm II
#39. My shirt and my hat always say 'World Champion' in some language. English, Spanish, Chinese, 'Star Wars' language, which is also known as Aurebesh, mermaid language.
Judah Friedlander
#40. I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.
Ken Bruen
#41. The English, by and large, being a crass and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe.
Terry Pratchett
#42. 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
#43. 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
#45. 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
#46. I am a central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis. I am irritable and have weak nerves.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#47. Is it surprising that modern English land law should resemble a chaos rather than a system?
Edward Jenks
#48. Bad people? What kind of bad people? Members of the Church of Satan? Insurance salesmen? People who don't speak English?
Wayne Gerard Trotman
#49. 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
#51. The only English patients I have ever known refuse tea, have been typhus cases; and the first sign of their getting better was their craving again for tea.
Florence Nightingale
#52. My dream is not Hollywood, but to perform my act in English to 30 people in a Soho comedy club, to show New Yorkers what they look like from the French point of view.
Gad Elmaleh
#53. Kieran unfolded the letter and scanned the scrawled message....
'Beware an English assassin.'
He knew exactly what this meant.
Madeline Martin
#54. 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
#55. Our government should speak a common language with the American people - plain English.
Alan Siegel
#56. My joke is that my father was a minister and my mother was an English teacher, so I'm trained to see the world in terms of symbols, which is hard when you just want to make toast.
Libba Bray
#57. Famous in our circles is the story of the visiting English banker who in 1948 upon seeing our model 95 camera commented, 'Very interesting, but why would one want a picture in a minute?'
Edwin Land
#58. It is no exaggeration to describe plain English as a fundamental tool of government.
Margaret Thatcher
#59. [T]ea, that uniquely English meal, that unnecessary collation at which no stimulants
neither alcohol nor meat
are served, that comforting repast of which to partake is as good as second childhood.
Angela Carter
#60. I am happy to see you, Masood."
"Happy? Happy? What a pale, pathetic English word. You must not be 'happy' to see me. No, you must be enraptured, transported! You must be overjoyed. I have no use for 'happy'.
Damon Galgut
#61. 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
#62. A whore, we've established that, filthy, it goes without saying, but whatever else the hell I am, I AM NOT ENGLISH.
Elizabeth Wein
#63. If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English Opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves the punishment of bearing it.
Margaret Fuller
#64. I came to Los Angeles for the first time in 1994. I spoke no English. I only knew how to say two sentences: 'How are you?' and 'I want to work with Johnny Depp.'
Penelope Cruz
#65. Jessica swallowed. "I think you had better stick to English."
"But Italian is so moving," Dain said.
"To ho voluto dal primo che ti vedi." I've wanted you from the first moment I saw you.
"Mi tormenti ancora." You've tormented me ever since.
Loretta Chase
#66. The English should give Ireland home rule - and reserve the motion picture rights.
Will Rogers
#67. 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
#68. The sky which had started out with such verve and spirit in the morning was beginning to lose its concentration and slip back into its normal English condition, that of a damp and rancid dish cloth.
Douglas Adams
#69. There is a story I always tell my students ... when I came for the 1st time to the US. I didn't speak English (Only Spanish) & I saw on every door the word "exit" which in Spanish means Success = Exito. And then I said :"No wonder Americans are winners ,every door they open leads to success
Pablo
#70. John Guidetti is a typical English striker. Even though he is Swedish
Gareth Barry
#71. I haven't had any formal education. Through the grace of god, I am gifted in mathematics and the English language.
Shakuntala Devi
#72. The way I putted today, I must've been reading the greens in Spanish and putting them in English.
Homero Blancas
#73. I was in the fashion shows in Milan; I was seventeen, I was doing like 100 shows. People were asking, 'How does it feel to be the model of the moment?' It was hard for me to answer as myself. I barely spoke English.
Gisele Bundchen
#74. Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion ...
Benjamin Franklin
#75. Before I joined the project most of the English people with whom I had made personal contacts were left wing and affected to some degree or other by the same kind of philosophy.
Klaus Fuchs
#76. I feel very English. I'm proud of it. I wanted there to be a thread connecting everything, the songs, clothes, artwork, even the string arrangements. It all creates a certain atmosphere.
Gabrielle Aplin
#77. 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
#78. John Locke invented common sense, and only Englishmen have had it ever since!
Bertrand Russell
#79. 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
#80. I was a halfway-decent-looking English boy who looked nice in a drawing-room standing by a piano.
Peter Lawford
#82. A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.
Gustav Stresemann
#83. What has been termed 'correct' English is nothing other than the blatant legitimation of the white middle-class code.
Dale Spender
#84. The Australian fans are really friendly and personable; the sense of humour is a lot less dry than the English.
Tom Hopper
#85. I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.
Peter Porter
#86. I spent the period reading the first novel assigned for English. And wow. If I hadn't realized I was in France yet, I do now. Because Like Water for Chocolate has sex in it. LOTS of sex.
Stephanie Perkins
#87. I give pleasure to you. Do not interfere..." #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
#88. You know, even growing up going to school, I had teachers that were against bilingual teaching. I never understood that. My parents always had me speak Spanish first knowing I was going to speak English in school.
Emily Rios
#89. We were very kindly received by the English merchants to whom my companion had letters, and we set ourselves to learn what was the real state of things in Mexico.
Edward Burnett Tylor
#90. I was shy when I was a kid, I was very shy, but now I think I've improved a lot. I can speak OK with the media and with the people. My English is still bad but I feel a little bit better now than before.
Rafael Nadal
#91. There is abundant proof that the opening of our ports always tends to raise the price of foreign corn to the price in the English market, and not to sink the price of British corn to the price in the continental market.
Joseph Hume
#92. I have stayed in south India all my life. English comes more naturally to me than Hindi.
Anushka Sharma
#94. For us Indians, I don't think English can ever exude that magic of emotions which our mother tongue can.
Kailash Kher
#95. What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what's the world coming to, eh?
Dorothy L. Sayers
#96. If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.
Oscar Wilde
#97. I'll buy it right now, Jack," said an English voice, somehow familiar, "if you stop being such a fucking tosser, that is.
Neal Stephenson
#98. 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
#99. In the States, the Abdication story, for example, is portrayed as The World Well Lost For Love while the English, of a certain type anyway, see it only as childish, irresponsible and absurd.
Julian Fellowes
#100. Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English ... ?
Chris Cleave
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