Quotes About English History

#1. English history consists largely of royal people getting their heads chopped off ... Needless to say, this brand of history was a hit with our son.

Dave Barry

#2. 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

#3. At school, I never had a hold on English history, and cheder was a place run by sadistic incompetents, so I felt alienated from the Jewish part of my past.

Clive Sinclair

#4. From William of Orange to William Pitt the younger there was but one man without whom English history must have taken a different turn, and that was William Pitt the elder.

Albert Bushnell Hart

#5. English history is aristocracy with the doors open. Who has courage and faculty, let him come in.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#6. It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.

Peter Ackroyd

#7. Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.

Simon Schama

#8. Although I've lived in England for more than twenty years, I still have a foreigner's passion for all the details of English history and rural life.

Meg Rosoff

#9. The more you look back into English history, the more you are forced to the conclusion that alongside civility and the deeply held convictions about individual rights, the English have a natural taste for disorder.

Anna Pavlova

#10. I've made a dog's breakfast of English history, geography, 'King Lear,' and the English language in general.

Christopher Moore

#11. With the ascension of Charles I to the throne we come at last to the Central Period of English History (not to be confused with the Middle Ages, of course), consisting in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).

W.C. Sellar

#12. English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.

Malcolm Bradbury

#13. Few people know anything of the English history but what they learn from Shakespear; for our story is rather a tissue of personal adventures and catastrophes than a series of political events.

Elizabeth Montagu

#14. Not all of E. Nesbit's children's books are fantasies, but even the most realistic somehow seem magical. In her holiday world, nobody ever goes to school, though all the kids know their English history, Greek myths, and classic tales of derring-do.

Michael Dirda

#15. I think in English history a very interesting character is John Lilburne. Very interesting character because of the way he managed to develop the whole debate about the English civil war into something very different.

Jeremy Corbyn

#16. If there is anything that is likely to put me to sleep," he said, "it would be an English history book. So you can hold hands with a clear conscience." "I'm going with Nurse Burrows." "You can still hold hands." "I've no patience with you," she said patiently and faded backwards into the gloom.

Josephine Tey

#17. Just heard Paul Scholes has retired, best I've ever played against by a mile. Most technically gifted player in english history. Legend.

Joey Barton

#18. The attitude of the English towards English history reminds one a good deal of the attitude of a Hollywood director towards love.

Margaret Halsey

#19. 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

#20. I think in some parts of our English history we've had huge amounts of almost too much great comedy. You kind of wonder how so much great work could come out of one country.

Kate Bush

#21. We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales.

Evelyn Waugh

#22. I'd always try to get a C, maybe a B. Other girls would trot off a brilliant essay and go off to Oxford; I'd think: 'Where is the justice?' I took A-levels in English, history and theatre studies and got three Bs.

Romola Garai

#23. But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not been an honest dullard.

James G. Frazer

#24. English history turned on Henry VIII and his desires, his whims almost. And it was down to Cromwell to make those desires happen. He was the guy that fixed it. He was also the guy that eased Henry's conscience. Because Henry VIII had an enormous, tender conscience and great theological knowledge.

Ben Miles

#25. The present illegitimacy ratio is not only unprecedented in the past two centuries; it is unprecedented, so far as we know, in American history going back to colonial times, and in English history from Tudor times.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

#26. 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

#27. During the settling of the American colonies, it was said that the Spaniards would first build a church, the Dutch would first build a fort and the English a tavern. Welcome to Charleston, an English colony founded in 1670.

Mark R. Jones

#28. 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

#29. If I can't find a project that I'm really interested in, I'll just go back to college where I've been studying art history and French. I'm also going to study English and philosophy - the whole curriculum!

Emmy Rossum

#30. We should not blur the lines between legal and illegal immigrants. Millions of people around the world have gone through the process to come here legally and they followed the rules that required them to pay a fee, learn English, and learn about American history and government.

Ken Calvert

#31. I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.

F. Sionil Jose

#32. If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.

A.A. Milne

#33. I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

#34. I was taking a nap in the theater one day while I ditched English, when I looked up and saw Jess on the stage. I had to pinch myself, because I figured either I was dreaming or else I'd died and gone to heaven - which given my history was probably not where I'd end up.

Carolee Dean

#35. The English love an insult. It's their only test of a man's sincerity.

Benjamin Franklin

#36. Redmond Howard, a politically aware witness to the Rising and a critic of the rebels, wrote in its aftermath: 'There never was, I believe, an Irish crime -- if crime it can be called -- which had not its roots in an English folly.

Tim Pat Coogan

#37. Nine English traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the 19th century.

C.P. Snow

#38. I often think that eventually I'd love to do some papers ... my correspondence if life calms down a bit, but I think I'd do history or English literature ... I've had enough of journos.

Brooke Fraser

#39. I spent a year at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, then transferred back to the University of Texas, where I majored in English and history.

Joe Jamail

#40. The first English settlers of North America knew they were making history. New Englanders in particular were so sure of it that they started writing their own accounts of themselves as soon as they got here.

Edmund Morgan

#41. School was rough for me. I was a good student in middle school, but high school wasn't so fun. I still pulled through, though! I excelled in art, fashion, history and English literature - anything creative. Math and science I struggled a bit more in.

India De Beaufort

#42. My favorite subject was either English or History. I had a really awesome high school education.

Ian Harding

#43. The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of 'the history play.' There can be no doubt that Shakespeare's presentations of 'Henry V' and 'Richard III' have been incalculably more influential than any more sober historical study.

Peter Ackroyd

#44. History shows that erections happen at the worst possible times, and they stick around until someone else notices them. Often, it is either a librarian or an English teacher, like Mrs. Edith Mitchell.

Andrew Smith

#45. Despite history, despite English, despite the noteworthies, and a little bit also despite ourselves, alas!, the Quebecois people have stayed French. I had violently returned. This people had no need of directives to affirm its French pride in the face of the whole world

Pierre Bourgault

#46. The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.

Michael Eric Dyson

#47. If somebody's going to earn citizenship, with whatever other hurdles are put in the way, at the end of the road they should be able to speak English, they should be able to read English, they should have some knowledge of American history,

Rudy Giuliani

#48. I wasn't particularly good at school so always found essay writing hard, so I didn't do that well at English or history, even though I enjoyed it.

Ruby Bentall

#49. Memorable among the Saxon warriors were Hengist and his wife (? or horse), Horsa. Hengist made himself King in the South. Thus Hengist was the first English King and his wife (or horse), Horsa, the first English Queen (or horse).

W.C. Sellar

#50. British garden history is best understood as a small incident in the histories of ideas, design and technology.

Tom Turner

#51. The young man never seemed to know what idleness was," marveled Cutler, "and every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic or some abstruse book on natural history in his hands.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#52. Joe was so tired that he had slept through first hour Spanish, second hour history, and most of third hour English. The English teacher, Mrs. Lane, hadn't taken a liking to that. She decided to send Joe to the principal to discuss why he was so sleepy, which Joe hadn't taken a liking to.

Belart Wright

#53. In the history of humanity, there have been many languages, including French, that have served as universal languages: Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Yet none of them ever ruled the world the way English does today.

Minae Mizumura

#54. But there stands the sword of my ancestor Sir Richard Vernon, slain at Shrewsbury, and sorely slandered by a sad fellow called Will Shakspeare, whose Lancastrian partialities, and a certain knack at embodying them, has turned history upside down, or rather inside out.

Walter Scott

#55. If England had not used the services of privateers and pirates during its long struggle with Spain, there is some likelihood that people today in North America would be speaking Spanish rather than English.

Robert Earl Lee

#56. I think fondly of the rabbit holes I disappeared down when I researched papers for history and English because I couldn't find quite what I was looking for, or because I had to go through so much material to find examples for my thesis.

Christina Baker Kline

#57. [These]were the legitimate acts of self-defense which had been forced upon the Irish people by English aggression... We did not initiate the war, nor were we allowed to choose the battleground.

Michael Collins

#58. Despite centuries of English literature, the most famous split infinitive in all of history comes from Star Trek.

R. Curtis Venture

#59. Where's your sketch pad?" I asked.
... "I gave that up," Kay said. "I wasn't very good, so I changed my major."
"To what?"
"To pre-med, then psychology, then English lit, then history."
"I like a woman who knows what she wants."
Kay smiled. "So do I, but I don't know any.

James Ellroy

#60. Whoever heard of such a mixture of languages in one army, since there were French, Flemings, Frisians, Gauls, Sayonards, Lotharingians, Allemani, Bavarians, Normans, English, Scots, Aquitanians, Italians, Danes, Apulians, Iberians, Bretons, Greeks and Armenians.

Fulcher Of Chartres

#61. The English inn stands permanently planted at the confluence of the roads of history, memory, and romance.

Martha Grimes

#62. Hocus was an old cunning attorney. The words of consecration, "Hoc est corpus," were travestied into a nickname for jugglery, as "Hocus-pocus." - John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People, 1874. see Charles Macklin.

John Arbuthnot

#63. There's a history of English literature where the best boils to the top, and Jane Austen stands right at the top of that.

JJ Feild

#64. Kids deserve arts, and it's just as important as science, math, history, English or athletics.

Flea

#65. He was hounded by the shade of his brother, demanding terribly the price of blood... William of Malmesbury, the History of the English Kings.

Patricia Bracewell

#66. The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.

Barbara Tuchman

#67. I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.

John Fowles

#68. I had always looked down on sociology as this arriviste discipline. It didn't have the noble history of English and history as a subject. But once I had a little exposure to it, I said, 'Hey, here's the key. Here's the key to understanding life and all its forms.'

Tom Wolfe

#69. It is the glory of English Law, that its roots are sunk deep into the soil of national history; that it is the slow product of the age long growth of the national life.

Edward Jenks

#70. Floyd Paterson? Boy, he's the complete opposite to me. He no way like me.They go down in history for just being athletes. I'm getting more praise and credit for doing what I'm doing now on this show than coming here and beating five of your English champions.

Muhammad Ali

#71. He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more ... well, pleasant.

Mary Balogh

#72. Those who do not know history are probably also not doing well in English or math. P.J. O'Rourke

P. J. O'Rourke

#73. Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.

Susanna Clarke

#74. History class was a forty-minute squirm from which I would emerge unscathed by insight. Down the hall in English Lit, though, there were stories to be had, and it was stories I craved.

Nancy Horan

#75. That there should be so wide a difference between us Americans and these English, from whom we were divided, so to say, but the other day, is one of the most peculiar physiological phenomena that the history of the world will have afforded. As

Anthony Trollope

#76. The Muppet Show is very much seen as an English thing. So for us in the U.K. it is one of the treasures of the history of children's TV and of comedy basically.

James Bobin

#77. English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.

David Crystal

#78. 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

#79. I always loved English because whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we think we are. English is much more a story of who we really are.

Nikki Giovanni

#80. I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.

Penelope Lively

#81. Alexander von Humboldt's wide-ranging Views of Nature is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century natural history, at once science and art. Mark W. Person's stunning new translation makes the wonders of this classic accessible to the English-language world of the present.

Daniel Walker Howe

#82. Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who'd been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons.

Hunter S. Thompson

#83. I always have tendency to form very strong local attachments, so I was very keen to find out about the school I was going to, its history, and the countryside. I was acquiring a kind of English character if you like, Englishness about things and my attitudes.

Ibn Warraq

#84. Had I not gone to Japan in 1986, had I stayed home and majored in English literature as I'd intended to do, I might indeed have become an investment banker, an outcome that perhaps would have proved a more severe blow to the health of the U.S. economy than to the history of the novel.

John Burnham Schwartz

#85. If it had not been for the English I should have been emperor of the East, but wherever there is water to float a ship we are sure to find them in our way.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#86. Who can doubt that between the English and the French, between the Scotch and the Irish, there are differences of character which have profoundly affected and still affect the course of history?

Goldwin Smith

#87. 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

#88. English is my language because of the history, and what I try to do - and I did that in 'Carpentaria' in particular - is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking.

Alexis Wright

#89. Your great country is wonderful at stealing pieces of history and using it for its own purposes, so there didn't seem to be anything particularly unusual about it but the English were incredibly exercised about it.

Michael Apted

#90. A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text.

Jonathan Galassi

#91. You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

Richard Dawkins

#92. I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

George Eliot

#93. The only things I could do were English, drama and history. I loved them subjects, but I hated everything else.

Michael Socha

#94. What finally scuppered Napoleon's Europe was of course the fatal combination of the English Channel and the Russian winter; the same unlikely partnership that also did for Hitler's Europe.

Andrew Roberts

#95. English kings married their cousins and so their kids were as sharp as clubs.

Peter Prasad

#96. Obviously, I would have been happier if Canada had not been conquered in the past by the English, if this part of North America had remained French, but you can't rewrite history.

Jean Chretien

#97. Today, for the first time in history, a Bishop of Rome sets foot on English soil. This fair land, once a distant outpost of the pagan world, has become, through the preaching of the Gospel, a beloved and gifted portion of Christ's vineyard.

Pope John Paul II

#98. While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.

Henry David Thoreau

#99. As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#100. The characteristic danger of great nations, like the Romans or the English which have a long history of continuous creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions which they have created

Walter Bagehot