Quotes About English People

#1. It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.

Billy Collins

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Bad people? What kind of bad people? Members of the Church of Satan? Insurance salesmen? People who don't speak English?

Wayne Gerard Trotman

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Our government should speak a common language with the American people - plain English.

Alan Siegel

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. Americans like to think 'Python' is how English people really are. There is an element of truth to that.

Eric Idle

#20. 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

#21. English is the language of a people ho have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.

Paul Scott

#22. 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

#23. People have asked me why I made the first chapter of my first novel so long, and in an invented English. The only answer I can come up with that satisfies me is, 'To keep out the scum.'

Alan Moore

#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. 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

#26. People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.

Steven Pinker

#27. American audiences are affected by what the English people think.

Chita Rivera

#28. Did you ask people to crime scenes on dates?

Maureen Johnson

#29. People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

John McWhorter

#30. I've done quite a few adverts. I've also done some presenting and acting work in Spain. I did a lot of Spanish education videos for people wanting to learn English.

Christopher Parker

#31. 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

#32. The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?

John Rocker

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. The landlord was trying to explain that there were a great many English people in his house, all fighting duels or having hysterics.

Georgette Heyer

#37. I meet people overseas that know five languages - that the only language I'm comfortable in is English.

Bill Gates

#38. Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.

Bill Bryson

#39. My tastes went all over the place, from Strauss to Mahler. I was never a big Wagner or Tchaikovsky fan. Benjamin Britten, Tallis, all the early English Medieval music, Prokofiev, some Russian composers, mostly the people that were the colorists, the French.

James Horner

#40. It took me a year to really learn the American lingo. I really feel for people who are coming here and don't speak English at all. It must be hell.

Helen Reddy

#41. I love the English way, which is not as capitalistic as it is in America. People don't talk about work and money. They talk about interesting things at dinner parties.

Gwyneth Paltrow

#42. The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.

George Bernard Shaw

#43. 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

#44. I can wear a baseball cap; I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people look wrong in a baseball cap.

Bill Bryson

#45. Continental people have a sex life; the English have hot-water bottles.

George Mikes

#46. I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?

James A. Michener

#47. Americans were most likely good people ... the only thing wrong with them, David thought, was that they spoke English very badly.

Anne Holm

#48. Manchester United have risen to the pinnacle of the English game at a time when the rewards are so high - thanks to the ticket to the Champions League - that they have resources that only a handful of other sides, through merit or the exploitation of the people of Russia, can approach.

Phil Cornwell

#49. Half the people in London were not English anyway: they were Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Caribbean, Indian and Chinese. All the drug dealers came from islands: Maltese men sold pep pills,

Ken Follett

#50. 'Marielena' was a wonderful experience that so many people still remember today. It challenged me to practice my Spanish. Having been born and raised in Miami, English was very much my dominant language!

Maria Canals Barrera

#51. When I'm on television, I'm talking to millions of people, so the conversation is totally different. My words are different. My diction is different because now I'm really talking American English and not homeboy English.

Keyshawn Johnson

#52. For the people of my country," Renato said, "water is everything: love, life, religion ... even God."
"It is like that for me too," I said. "In English we call that a metaphor."
"Of course," said Renato, "and water is the most abundant metaphor on earth.

Pam Houston

#53. I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

J.K. Rowling

#54. The four most important words in the English language are, "What do you think?" Listen to your people and learn.

J.W. "Bill" Marriott Jr.

#55. Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide.

Terry Pratchett

#56. 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

#57. If we were still English we'd be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road - pretty much what people do on the Fourth of July anyway.

Lorrie Moore

#58. The only people who should play for England are English people

Jack Wilshere

#59. You'll hear people say it's racist to test. Folks, it's racist not to test. Because guess who gets shuffled through the system oftentimes? Children whose parents don't speak English as a first language, inner-city kids. It's so much easier to quit on somebody than to remediate.

George W. Bush

#60. Many people are intimidated by doctors ... People also feel stupid when they don't understand what a doctor's talking about the first time around, so they don't ask again. And let's be honest here, people. English is not a doctor's first language.

Erma Bombeck

#61. I ram my phone back in my pocket and reread the same page in Hamlet for the thirteenth time. I still don't see how this is supposed to be English. I have no clue what these people are saying.

Rachel Harris

#62. Many people just think they understand English, remember.

Emma Wagner

#63. People like Shakira shouldnt have record contracts. She cant even speak English.

Avril Lavigne

#64. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.

George Orwell

#65. Earthly order 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

Charles Dickens

#66. We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.

Virginia Woolf

#67. For the majority of English people there are only two religions, Roman Catholic, which is wrong, and the rest, which don't matter.

Duff Cooper

#68. When you sing in English and Spanish, it's two completely different forms of expression and ... even the people who don't speak Spanish love to hear me sing in Spanish.

Gloria Estefan

#69. Most Muslim women know it is fear and curiosity that cause people to stare. They know it is ignorance and stereotypes that cause people to suppose that a piece of material covering the hair strips a woman of the ability to speak English, pursue a career, work a remote control.

Randa Abdel-Fattah

#70. The mistakes were made by people who did not know how to wield the concepts University, division and team-spirit. Their puzzles arose from inability to use certain items in the English vocabulary.

Anonymous

#71. All these people - the people of the English mother's side - had been of condition more or less eminent; yet with oddities and disparities that had often since made Maria, thinking them over, wonder what they really quite rhymed to. It

Henry James

#72. I saw a film today, oh boy,
The English army had just won the war,
A crowd of people turned away,
But I just had to look, having read the book ...

The Beatles

#73. The Welsh people have a talent for acting that one does not find in the English. The English lack heart.

Anthony Hopkins

#74. Pal, if you ever look up the word right in a dictionary, you'll find it's one of the oldest words in the English language. Even so, people have never stopped arguing about what it means. I suspect they always will.

Avi

#75. I think English people were a lot better at breakdancing than they were at making records.

Norman Cook

#76. My biggest entertainment in Moscow was to go to the subway and watch people. When American students visited, I watched them; I learned English from them.

Roustam Tariko

#77. And English society was was not exactly welcoming to these rich newcomers: Imagine Kim Kardashian marrying Prince Henry today and you get the general idea of the suspicion and disdain that the Americans encountered.

Daisy Goodwin

#78. Should such an ignorant people lead the world? How did it come to this in the first place? 82 percent of us don't even have a passport! Just a handful can speak a language other than English.

Michael Moore

#79. I am all for the inclusion of foreign cultures, not their omission in our media. Foreign names, brands, and inventions must be allowed to show and to compete in US publications. Today, most foreign words are still banned. And almost 7 billion people whose first language is not English are silenced.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#80. The people who run the major banks have MBAs and wear suits. And when those people in suits come to the homes of people who don't have a high school diploma, don't even speak English, and offer them a home at zero percent down, that doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.

Ramin Bahrani

#81. You have people who are good at English but don't have the training in Buddhism or Shambhala, or they have the training but are not good in English. Getting that mixture is really rare.

Sakyong Mipham

#82. If you sit on an airplane and you tell the English person sitting next to you that you have a bomb in your bag, they would probably be pissed off. Not as much pissed off as if you were talking to them all the time during the journey, but still, quite pissed off.

Angela Kiss

#83. The English were fascinated with the Italian people and their amazing Epicurean culture. Italian poetry, painting, pornography, music, drama, fashion, wine, women, cheese, anything Italiano was a premium commodity in London during Shakespeare's day.

Mark Lamonica

#84. 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

#85. Sham marriages have been widespread; people have been allowed to settle in Britain without being able to speak English; and there have not been rules in place to stop migrants becoming a burden on the taxpayer. We are changing all of that.

Theresa May

#86. She wasn't some little princess from the suburbs who just graduated college with a humanities degree, she knew what people were really like.

David Wong

#87. English people are famous for never speaking out but only saying what they really feel about you behind your back. Americans believe the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I like exploring those, er, differences in national snippiness.

Rachel Johnson

#88. More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

Bill Bryson

#89. I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they've made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.

Gary Shteyngart

#90. By the middle of Henry VIII's reign, the white meats - that is, dairy products - were considered common fare and people from all classes would eat meat whenever they could get it.

Clarissa Dickson Wright

#91. Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

Virginia Woolf

#92. I feel Scottish when with English people, and when I'm with Scottish people, I realise I'm English.

Nina Conti

#93. They had tried to reproduce their own attitude to life upon the stage, and to dress up as the middle-class English people they actually were.

E. M. Forster

#94. A lot of people don't know enough about me. When I meet people who freak out about Game of Thrones, they don't even know that I can speak English.

Jason Momoa

#95. As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#96. In his novels from beginning to end, Dickens is making the same point always: that to the English governing classes the people they govern are not real.

Edmund Wilson

#97. Tea. He watched her while she made it, made it, of course, all wrong: the water not on the boil, the teapot unheated, too few leaves. She said, I never quite understand why English people like teas so.

Graham Greene

#98. Goodbye Darcy, goodbye Jean, goodbye stone cottage, scratchy towels, fields of wildflowers; good bye gorgeous Peak District ... OK English People, for your own good, get off the roads, here we come!

Susan Branch

#99. I've always said, 'I am a selector, I am not defector' - the first few phrases in English I learned. I said I hate 'defector'; something defective about the people. It's a bad word.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

#100. The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.

Thomas Carlyle