Quotes About Plain English

#1. It is no exaggeration to describe plain English as a fundamental tool of government.

Margaret Thatcher

#2. This book aims to give in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style.

William Strunk Jr.

#3. Among the things that should make your antennae twitch are technical terms like "capitalized," "deferred," and "restructuring" - and plain-English words signaling that the company has altered its accounting practices, like "began," "change," and

Benjamin Graham

#4. Yes, that man acted ugly," she told us in plain English. "But throwing more ugliness back at him ain't the answer.

Lauren Myracle

#5. Communists, socialists and fascists everywhere, from Mr. Obama upward, have taken to the global warming cause like a quack to colored water. Just about every word they utter on this subject is a falsehood calculated to deceive, or in plain English a lie.

Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton Of Brenchley

#6. [The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.

Ben Jonson

#7. Men of Science would do well to talk plain English. The most abstruse questions can very well be discussed in our own tongue ... I make a particular appeal to the botanists, who appear to delight in troublesome words.

Oliver Lodge

#8. I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose.

Bertrand Russell

#9. The terrorists haven't won, and we should tell them in plain English, 'No, there will never be a mosque at Ground Zero.'

Renee Ellmers

#10. As historical texts become rich and conceptually dense, readers may slow down not because they fail to comprehend, but because the very act of comprehension demands that they stop to TALK with their texts. In plain English, they pretend to deliberate with others by talking to themselves.

Sam Wineburg

#11. The Constitution isn't written in Chinese, Swahili or Sanskrit. It's in plain English.

Harry Browne

#12. A passage is not plain English - still less is it good English - if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#13. One of the maxims which the devil, in a late visit upon earth, left to his disciples, is, when once you are got up, to kick the stool from under you. In plain English, when you have made your fortune by the good offices of a friend, you are advised to discard him as soon as you can.

Henry Fielding

#14. The English, the plain English, of the politest address of a gentleman to a lady is, I am now, dear Madam, your humble servant: Pray be so good as to let me be your Lord and Master.

Samuel Richardson

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

Alan Siegel

#16. Cucumber gives the business, developers, and testers a way to collaborate and specify, in plain English, how the system should work.

Seb Rose

#17. While he has not, in my hearing, spoken the English language, he makes it perfectly plain that he understands it. And he uses his ears, tail, eyebrows, various rumbles and grunts, the slant of his great cold nose or a succession of heartrending sighs to get his meaning across.

Jean Little

#18. Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there's not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve.

Dick Cavett

#19. I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

Colleen McCullough

#20. I'm the only one who doesn't always want answers.

Adam Haslett

#21. How fortunate that it was an 'unconventional' party, where formalities are ruled out! On this basis Aziz found the English ladies easy to talk to, he treated them like men. Beauty would have troubled him, but Mrs Moore was so old and Miss Quested so plain that he was spared this anxiety.

E. M. Forster

#22. He took the laser pointer off the side table and flicked it on, dancing its red light over the wall. Comet finished eating then walked over like he wasn't really interested, like he just happened to be passing by, but then went predictably crazy.

Nina Post

#23. More powerful than the will to win is the courage to begin.

Orrin Woodward

#24. The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.

Camille Paglia

#25. My focus was always toward imagery of some sort.

David Salle

#26. I'd always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn't.

Roy Lichtenstein

#27. Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.

Roger Ebert

#28. I have to believe in God. Because if I didn't believe in God...I'd have to believe in man.

Lindor Joelle

#29. To keep your skin looking healthy and young, wear a hat.

Mia Sara