Top 100 Quotes About Englishman
#1. A true Englishman doesn't joke when he is talking about so serious a thing as a wager.
Jules Verne
#2. Michael Powell always used to say 'I'm a typical Englishman'. He was and he wasn't. He was very cosmopolitan and spent a lot of time in Europe.
Thelma Schoonmaker
#3. Life isn't all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman's education.
Thomas Hughes
#4. In his mind he vaguely pondered whether he should strike that long-legged Englishman in the face and call him a coward, or whether such conduct in a lady's presence might be deemed ungentlemanly, when Marguerite happily interposed.
Emmuska Orczy
#5. The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.
Raymond Chandler
#6. I love the sad songs with their maudlin, self-deprecating, almost funny lyrics. As an Englishman, they make a lot of sense.
Teddy Thompson
#7. 'English fair play' is a fine expression. It justifies the bashing of the puny draper's assistant by the big hairy blacksmith, and this to the perfect satisfaction of both parties, if they are worthy the name of Englishman.
Joseph Furphy
#8. Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married. But not to an Englishman; to one who, like herself, is French by birth. And speaking of Gaspard (ah, poor Gaspard! It was cruel, cruel!), it is a curious thing that she is going
Charles Dickens
#9. The scene he witnessed there in the twilight depths of the African jungle was burned forever into the Englishman's brain.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#10. Second time you have made that observation. If one puts forward an idea to a true Englishman
always a rash thing to do
he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. The only thing
Oscar Wilde
#11. It is an Englishman who turns out to be the real villain of 'The Moonstone.' By contrast, the three Indian priests who dedicate their lives to returning the jewel to its proper home in the temple, though they have nothing personal to gain by doing so, are positively heroic.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#12. Every Englishman is convinced of one thing, viz.: That to be an Englishman is to belong to the most exclusive club there is.
Ogden Nash
#13. The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman.
Edmund Barton
#14. The best-dressed man is an Italian who is trying to look English, or an Englishman who is trying to look Italian.
Diane Von Furstenberg
#15. I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since.
Anne Stevenson
#16. I'm an Englishman. What more can I say?
Alan Sugar
#17. There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side, he was kind of a rather stiff, disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important.
John Boorman
#18. Sassenach. He had called me that from the first; the Gaelic word for outlander, a stranger. An Englishman. First in jest, then in affection.
Diana Gabaldon
#19. I think some orator commenting upon that fate said that though the winds of heaven might whistle around an Englishman's cottage, the King of England could not.
John James Ingalls
#20. An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.
Edmund Burke
#21. The third absolute right, inherent in every Englishman, is that of ... the sacred and inviolable rights of private property.
William Blackstone
#22. An Englishman bears with patience any ridicule which foreigners cast upon him. John Bull never laughs so loudly as when he laughs at himself; but the Americans are nationally sensitive and cannot endure that good-humoured raillery which jests at their weaknesses and foibles.
Isabella Bird
#23. The Englishman walks before the law like a trained horse in the circus. He has the sense of legality in his bones, in his muscles.
Maxim Gorky
#24. It doesn't matter, really, does it, sweet'art?" he said, still smiling lazily. "Not after what's 'appened already. What's once more, eh? And I'm an Englishman, too," he coaxed. "Not a filthy Scot.
Diana Gabaldon
#25. The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three [Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden and George Saintsbury], the greatest critic that ever lived - not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve.
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve
#26. The very phrase 'foreign affairs' makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.
Benjamin Disraeli
#27. The true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out.
E. M. Forster
#28. The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
John Updike
#29. Deep down in his heart the genuine Englishman has a rugged distaste for seeing his country invaded by a foreign army. People were asking themselves by what right these aliens had overrun British soil. An ever-growing feeling of annoyance had begun to lay hold of the nation.
P.G. Wodehouse
#30. A true Englishman never jokes when he has a stake depending on the matter.
Jules Verne
#31. Frank made a face; an Englishman to the bone, he would rather lap water out of the toilet than drink tea made from teabags. The Lipton's had been left by Mrs. Grossman, the weekly cleaning woman, who thought tea made from loose leaves messy and disgusting.
Diana Gabaldon
#32. Bottled, was he?" Said Colonel Bantry, with an Englishman's sympathy for alcoholic excess. "Oh, well, can't judge a fellow by what he does when he's drunk? When I was at Cambridge, I remember I put a certain utensil - well - well, nevermind.
Agatha Christie
#33. Can anything be more boring than an upper-class Englishman?
Alice Walker
#34. Fee, fie, foe, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread." Ballimore shook her head. "Nonsense, dear. It's just Princess Cimorene and the King of the Enchanted Forest." "And neither of us is English," Cimorene added. The
Patricia C. Wrede
#35. I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, mettle and bottom. mettle: spirited bottom: capacity to endure strain
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#36. I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishman admire heroic failure. Given a choice
at least in my reading
I'm un-American enough to take quixotry over efficiency any day.
Anne Fadiman
#37. A True Born Englishman's a contradiction!
In speech and irony, in fact a fiction
Daniel Defoe
#38. The fact that an Englishman has an Argentinian as an idol is very rare. I keep watching my [title-winning] goal against QPR and every time I get more emotional. My plan is to stay here because I'm convinced Manchester City will be at the same level as Real Madrid and Barcelona.
Sergio Aguero
#39. Wherever God erects a house of prayer
the Devil always builds a chapel there;
And t'will be found, upon examination,
the latter has the largest congregation.
- Defoe's The True-Born Englishman, 1701
Daniel Defoe
#40. An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him.
Alan Jay Lerner
#41. It is not that the Englishman can't feel-it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks-his pipe might fall out if he did.
E. M. Forster
#42. If an Englishman gets run down by a truck he apologizes to the truck.
Jackie Mason
#43. If you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman's pleasures can be, and mostly are, shared by his dog.
George Bernard Shaw
#44. To the Indian, politics are what the weather is to an Englishman. Politics are an introduction to a stranger on a train, they are the standard filler for embarrassing silences in conversation, they are the inevitable small talk at any social gathering.
Santha Rama Rau
#45. The Sudanese have delighted me, not only in their generosity and simplicity, but also in their tendency to take tea with milk and not to hesitate to dunk biscuits in it. As an Englishman, you can imagine the feeling of fraternal closeness that this activity has generated.
Tom Allen
#46. A transplanted Irishman, German, Englishman is an American in one generation. A transplanted African is not one in five!
Barbara Chase-Riboud
#47. Every Englishman is an average Englishman: it is a national characteristic.
E.M. Delafield
#48. Who else but an Englishman could invent an oval ball.
Peter Pook
#49. How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.
George Bernard Shaw
#50. Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.
Robert Falcon Scott
#51. An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.
Mark Twain
#52. One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.
Matthew Arnold
#53. An Englishman does everything on principle: he fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.
George Bernard Shaw
#54. If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms never never never!
William Pitt
#55. I was a terrible dancer. I dance like an Englishman.
John Cleese
#56. Most Englishmen are convinced that God is an Englishman, probably educated at Eton.
E.M. Delafield
#57. I sound like an Englishman impersonating an American impersonating an Englishman.
Billie Joe Armstrong
#58. What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?
George Bernard Shaw
#60. ... if the Englishman does not disclose his soul, he readily opens his home. A Frenchman may reveal his life secrets after half an hour's aquaintance. But he does not ask one home.
Gustaaf Johannes Renier
#61. An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time
Diana Gabaldon
#62. The Englishman is too apt to neglect the present good in preparing against the possible evil.
Washington Irving
#63. I am not an Englishman, nor are you. Nor can we ever be, regardless of our foxtrots, our straight bats, our Jolly Goods and I Says.
No more the Anglicized Percy, I.
I am now Taimur Hind.
Kamila Shamsie
#64. Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.
Cecil Rhodes
#65. That is why I come forward tonight without any political label, without any bias, but just simply as an Englishman to say to you: a crime is being committed against civilization.
John Amery
#66. A land may be said to be discovered the first time a European, presumably an Englishman, sets foot on it.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson
#67. From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
Willa Cather
#68. It was all very well for an Englishman like Mr. Fogg to make the tour of the world with a carpet-bag; a lady could not be expected to travel comfortably under such conditions.
Jules Verne
#69. Indeed, the Englishman's history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.
Henry David Thoreau
#70. At the summit, there are statues illustrating pilgrims from the past. Often there is an Englishman here; he spends his summers helping pilgrims. He sells cans of soft drinks and gives away tea; he also has some basic medical supplies to help pilgrims suffering from blisters. The
Leslie Gilmour
#71. She was reserved and cold, as if having been stolen from her native village in a burlap sack and made to be servant and helpmate to an Englishman many years her senior, for some reasons sat poorly with her.
Ben H. Winters
#72. My mission is to convert every Indian, every Englishman and finally the world to nonviolence for regulating mutual relations, whether political, economic, social or religious.
Mahatma Gandhi
#73. Nothing commends a radical change to an Englishman more than the belief that it is really conservative.
H.A.L. Fisher
#74. [Tessa] knew about phantom limbs [....] Her cheek, where the Englishman's fingers had been, did not exactly ache ... but very strangely, most curiously ... it felt.
Eva Ibbotson
#75. Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?
E.B. White
#76. A second or two later, the reptile had been quite absorbed by a handsome, arrogant-looking Englishman smelling strongly of snobbery and snake.
P.B. Kerr
#77. From every Englishman emanates a kind of gas, the deadly choke-damp of boredom.
Heinrich Heine
#78. An Englishman hath three qualities, he can suffer no partner in his love, no stranger to be his friend, nor to be dared by any.
John Lyly
#80. The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.
Katharine Hepburn
#81. 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
#82. Sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy
F Scott Fitzgerald
#83. GLOUCESTER: I do not know that Englishman alive With whom my soul is any jot at odds, More than the infant that is born to-night: I thank my God for my humility.
William Shakespeare
#84. To me the soul of an Indian seemed as precious as the soul of an Englishman, and the Gospel as much for the Chinese as for the European.
James Gilmour
#85. I'm an Englishman who did a film on Mogadishu, 'Black Hawk Down.'
Ridley Scott
#86. Beware the horns of a bull, the heels of the horse, and the smile of an Englishman.
James Joyce
#87. The Englishman respects your opinions, but he never thinks of your feelings.
Wilfrid Laurier
#89. But in every century, and ever since England has been what it is, an Englishman has always felt somewhat ashamed of his own emotion and of his own sympathy.
Emmuska Orczy
#90. An Irish man fights before he reasons, a Scotchman reasons before he fights, an Englishman is not particular as to the order of precedence, but will do either to accommodate his customers.
Charles Caleb Colton
#91. There is a peculiarity in the countenance, as everybody knows, which, though it cannot be described, is sure to betray the Englishman.
George Henry Borrow
#93. He didn't want to be like some old-fashioned imperialist missionary, poncing about like Moses in a safari suit, capitalizing on a misconception that he was from the same tribe as Jesus and that God was an Englishman.
Michel Faber
#94. But to understand English is one thing; to understand an Englishman who talks is another.
Aleister Crowley
#95. Within 18 months of my parents' marriage in 1900, my mother fell in love with an Englishman who would have described himself as a gentleman but who was, in fact, nothing more than a devious adventurer.
Paul Mellon
#96. Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If, however, you force him to look into it, he'll at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.
James Agate
#97. We know that England is crying for a leader, and that leader has emerged in the person of the greatest Englishman I have ever known, Sir Oswald Mosley ... When the history of Europe comes to be written I can assure you that his name will not be second to either Mussolini or Hitler.
William Joyce
#98. An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.
George Mikes
#99. If any Englishman dedicated his life to securing the freedom of India, resisting tyranny and serving the land, I should welcome that Englishman as an Indian.
Mahatma Gandhi
#100. Never, and by this I mean never, criticise the English weather. Especially if you're an alien. For an English woman, it's as though you are scolding her first born child. For an Englishman, it's as if you are criticising the size of his penis. Or even worse: his football team.
Angela Kiss
