Top 100 Quotes About English People
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Americans like to think 'Python' is how English people really are. There is an element of truth to that.
Eric Idle
#5. American audiences are affected by what the English people think.
Chita Rivera
#6. 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
#7. The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.
George Bernard Shaw
#8. 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
#9. I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.
J.K. Rowling
#10. The only people who should play for England are English people
Jack Wilshere
#11. 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
#12. I think English people were a lot better at breakdancing than they were at making records.
Norman Cook
#13. 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
#14. I feel Scottish when with English people, and when I'm with Scottish people, I realise I'm English.
Nina Conti
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I considered the attacks on London useless, and I told the Fuhrer again and again that inasmuch as I knew the English people as well as I did my own people, I could never force them to their knees by attacking London. We might be able to subdue the Dutch people by such measures but not the British.
Hermann Goring
#19. English people are so not asshats! I'm going to move there. William Blake was English.
Jandy Nelson
#20. I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.
Carl Sandburg
#21. I love the English people - if you don't want to speak, you don't speak. And I'm quite like that sometimes.
Sophie Cookson
#22. 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
#23. Although it was very cold, he wore no coat. I think some English people think coats are for the weak.
Maureen Johnson
#24. I've played a lot of very posh, sort of noble or aristocratic English people, which is nothing like what I am, so I feel that there is quite a lot distance there and have played a little bit far away from myself.
James McAvoy
#25. Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real centre of the household.
George Bernard Shaw
#26. Enemies! People these days don't have enemies! Not English people!
Agatha Christie
#27. I'm reasonably easygoing. Messing up my lines or making a fool of myself is where you find my fears. Like a lot of English people, I'm prey to embarrassment - the dread that everyone's sort of sniggering at you, that you're going to look like an idiot. I think that sort of halts us all.
Hugh Laurie
#28. Madrid is not as big as London, but it is true when you are coming from a big city like Madrid, nothing is going to surprise you, and I am very happy to move to a city like London. It is a big city, and you can do everything you want with the respect that the English people always have.
Fernando Torres
#29. English people don't have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.
Vivien Leigh
#30. The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object.
Samuel Smiles
#31. The English people on the whole are surely the nicest people in the world, and everybody makes everything so easy for everyone else, that there is almost nothing to resist at all.
D.H. Lawrence
#32. The truth of the matter is, that most English people don't know how to make tea anymore either, and most people drink cheap instant coffee instead, which is a pity, and gives Americans the impression that the English are just generally clueless about hot stimulants.
Douglas Adams
#33. English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.
Jackson Browne
#34. For a moment David was tempted to think that perhaps there were no good people at all outside concentration camps, but then he reminded himself of the sailor and Angelo and the English people who might have been ignorant but were certainly not bad.
Anne Holm
#35. English people don't like to be told 'enjoy your meal'. They will enjoy their meal if they feel like enjoying it. It is advisable not to command them such things in case they have other plans with their meal, such as preferring to dislike it.
Angela Kiss
#36. Even on the first day we invaded Plover's house we sensed the conundrum that Americans are faced with in England: they're too frightened of English people to behave rudely to them, and too ignorant to know how to behave politely.
Lev Grossman
#37. Being drunk is the only situation when English people completely avoid health and safety rules.
Angela Kiss
#38. I think as English people, we don't want to be reminded that at one point we ruled three-quarters of the globe, and now we're a very small country that doesn't own three-quarters of the globe.
Jamie Bell
#39. Dating in England is different. First of all because English people don't like at all other people knowing them, and second, because English people are romantically impaired.
Angela Kiss
#40. Our English people are much addicted to raising idols, and then revenging themselves on their own idolatry by knocking down and demolishing the poor bits of wood and stone that they had worshipped as gods. How many literary reputations have been so treated!
Mary Russell Mitford
#41. Since coming to Harwell I have met English people of all kinds, and I have come to see in many of them a deep rooted firmness which enables them to lead a decent way of life.
Klaus Fuchs
#42. English people ... never speak, excepting in cases of fire or murder, unless they are introduced.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#43. Most English people are horrified that I use soap, but I like it - it works for my skin. I try different soaps all the time, but I use very mild ones.
Marie Helvin
#44. And why do English people sound smarter than the rest of us? Like they should be awarded the Nobel Prize for a simple greeting?
Jandy Nelson
#45. English people ... are very kind, very friendly, interested in a general way, and consider us a great, wonderful, unknown sort of Australia, and that is all.
M. E. W. Sherwood
#46. My fitness trainer's English, my physio's English, some of my friends are English. I don't have a problem with English people at all.
Andy Murray
#48. After all, it is an ancient and valuable right of the English people to turn their nouns into verbs when they are so minded.
Henry Watson Fowler
#49. If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they believe to be an urgent appointment.
Claud Cockburn
#50. It is a well-known fact that English people never know anything. They only think. The only exception they know and they are sure about in the whole world is Marmite. 'Love it or hate it.' There are no other options; there is no space for grey space.
Angela Kiss
#51. Civilization is not an incurable disease, but it should never be forgotten that the English people are at present afflicted by it.
Mahatma Gandhi
#52. I had always been so much taken with the way all English people I knew always were going to see their lawyer. Even if they have no income and do not earn anything they always have a lawyer.
Gertrude Stein
#53. It's funny because if you ever ask anyone in England to try and do a Beatles accent, no one knows what they really sound like. If you ask anyone in America, they would try and give it a go. English people just know their songs.
Aaron Johnson
#54. The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#55. I'm English and I am British. I don't know if I feel part of a music scene. Musically, I have as many feelings and affinity with Americans or Canadians, or all sorts of people as I do with English people.
David Gilmour
#56. Why on earth do we want closer connection with England? We have little in common with English people except our language. We are fast becoming an entirely different people.
Henry Lawson
#57. Lots of English people say exactly the opposite of what they mean.
Leon Krier
#59. I get some heat for what English people call 'overproduction.' I don't think my older stuff was overproduced, but I do think that sound has dated.
Jackson Browne
#60. 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
#62. Particularly for English people, Shakespeare is always at the forefront of both drama and the English language. He's always been there. I can't remember starting school and not learning about him.
Jamie Campbell Bower
#63. It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.
Billy Collins
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Bad people? What kind of bad people? Members of the Church of Satan? Insurance salesmen? People who don't speak English?
Wayne Gerard Trotman
#69. 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
#70. Our government should speak a common language with the American people - plain English.
Alan Siegel
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. I meet people overseas that know five languages - that the only language I'm comfortable in is English.
Bill Gates
#94. Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.
Bill Bryson
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Continental people have a sex life; the English have hot-water bottles.
George Mikes
#100. I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?
James A. Michener
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
