Top 100 Quotes About Speaking English
#1. I was raised speaking English and Spanish. And I also speak Danish. And I can get by in French and Italian. I've acted in Spanish and English, but when something has to do with emotions, sometimes I feel I can get to the heart of the matter better in Spanish.
Viggo Mortensen
#2. 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
#3. Back home, almost everything I did, I did in Hebrew. I went to drama school in Hebrew, my whole career was in Hebrew, and to switch languages was something that was fascinating and more complicated than I expected it to be, even though I've been speaking English since I could speak.
Yael Grobglas
#4. A little weird? That was freakin' Bizarroville."
He pauses and looks back at me.
"Are you speaking English?
Susan Ee
#5. I didn't know anything about fashion. I couldn't believe it when I got here. I don't know how I'm sitting here right now speaking English.
Adriana Lima
#6. My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.
Ted Cruz
#7. I instinctively decided that I would prove that I wasn't different, that it should not be odd to hear me speaking English. From that day forward I lived with this double impulse:the urge to disappear and the desperate desire to be accepted
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
#8. Wait a second," he said as he wrapped his mind around this linguistic distinction, "doesn't this mean that speaking English, thinking in English, somehow gives us permission to disrespect nature? By denying everyone else the right to be persons? Wouldn't things be different if nothing was an it?
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#9. I believe when you're speaking English, you're allowed to refer to it as Prague.
Emily St. John Mandel
#10. I didn't understand him. I mean, he was speaking English, and I understood the words, but I was confused. "What do you mean? What are you doing?
Gayla Twist
#11. Printing ballots in multiple languages costs millions of dollars every year. It also discourages immigrants from integrating into American society and gaining the benefits that come from speaking English.
Ernest Istook
#12. To read makes our speaking English good.
Joss Whedon
#13. My grandfather came over from Puerto Rico and raised his kids speaking English so that it would be easier for them to assimilate.
Aubrey Plaza
#14. I grew up speaking English and Spanish. I grew up moving from country to country due to political, governmental, and social issues and just family atmosphere that wasn't right to bring up your kid in a country where there's a dictatorship or a communist type sense, so I incorporate that int music.
Cristian Machado
#15. I am a Mexican that has been lucky enough to travel the world, speaking English, but with a heart that speaks a universal language.
Cesar Millan
#16. Always I am speaking English on behalf of fools
Michael Pitre
#17. Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.
Ann Patchett
#18. I believe you're speaking English, Turner, but I'm not sure you're doing a good job of it. It makes a girl wonder what you meant by, 'Here, let me take you to gaol.'" "I always mean precisely what I say, even if I don't say precisely what I
Courtney Milan
#19. Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, 'Blah, blah, blah.' That's when I get crazy.
Jackie Chan
#20. We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.
I have no native tongue.
Chuck Palahniuk
#21. We had probably our best ever Player of the Year Dance last week. You elected Dennis Wise as Player of the Year. Dennis accepted his award mimicking Vialli, whereupon Zola shouted 'Speak English', Dennis switched to his normal Cockney voice only for Zola to shout 'You're still not speaking English'.
Ken Bates
#22. I do have very deep, fond memories of my family in Mexico City, but I also remember feeling funny for not speaking English - I was basically an immigrant. But I picked up the language fast and soon I knew that I wanted to be a writer.
Louis C.K.
#23. I studied in American school, so yes, I grew up speaking English and Spanish. Obviously, Spanish is my first language.
Eiza Gonzalez
#24. I am speaking English, correct? I ask because sometimes I speak another language without meaning to.
Ashlan Thomas
#25. I don't believe in the so-called Latino explosion when it comes to movies. Jennifer Lopez doesn't have an accent. She grew up in New York speaking English, not Spanish. Her success is very important because she represents a different culture, but it doesn't help me.
Salma Hayek
#26. English should be our official language. Reading and speaking English are requirements to become a citizen.
Ernest Istook
#27. 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
#28. Slave holding is very unusual among the English-speaking peoples. Canadians didn't do it. Australians didn't do it. The Democratic Party and the states they controlled did it!
Sean Hannity
#29. The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.
Sara Sheridan
#30. I am an English-speaking Canadian, but my entire family - Russian exiles and the Canadians they married - is buried in Quebec, and if Quebec were to separate, I would feel I had been cut in two.
Michael Ignatieff
#31. Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world's brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays.
Terry Teachout
#32. The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.
Bernard Bailyn
#33. In my lifetime all our problems have come from mainland Europe and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations across the world.
Margaret Thatcher
#34. The perceived failings of leaders of other neutral or occupied European countries, including France, Spain, Sweden or Norway, or of the countries that fought alongside the Nazis, have not caught the public imagination in the English-speaking world in anything like the same way.
Clare O'Dea
#35. I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition of who I am. Then there's Italian, this strange, other component of me that I've just created. It was a creative process just to learn the language, never mind to start expressing myself in it.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#36. We've got to turn this backward thinking around where ignorance is championed over intelligence. Young black kids being ridiculed by their peers for getting A's and speaking proper English: that's criminal.
Spike Lee
#37. Perhaps the locale of the subjunctive mood will
one day be found. Will Latins turn out to be extravagantly endowed and English-speaking peoples significantly short-changed in this minor piece of brain anatomy?
Carl Sagan
#38. (Claude and Marcel LeFever were speaking in French. This simultaneous English translation is being beamed to the reader via literary satellite.)
Tom Robbins
#39. A lot of Latinos are like me: third generation, English speaking.
Al Madrigal
#40. When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I'd memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium.
Ben Lerner
#41. Within the black community, roughly 60 percent of children are born to single moms. Moms don't have the emotional wherewithal to deal with their children. Their English is atrocious. Their speaking is atrocious. The dropout rate is horrendous.
Walter Dean Myers
#42. Aditi is a comedy superstar over in India. She's only one of three female English-speaking comedians in India.
Hasan Minhaj
#43. 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
#44. I grew up speaking Spanish and English. My mother can speak Spanish, English, French and Italian, and she's pretty good at faking Portuguese. I wish that I spoke more languages than I do.
Sebastian Arcelus
#45. And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.
Gerry Abbey
#46. The principle of free speech is no new doctrine born of the Constitution of the United States. It is a heritage of English-speaking peoples, which has been won by incalculable sacrifice, and which they must preserve so long as they hope to live as free men.
Robert M. La Follette, Sr.
#47. The likelihood is that any English-speaking skier has more words for different types of snow than any inhabitant of Alaska or Greenland.
Larry Trask
#49. The time given to athletic contests and the injuries incurred on the playing field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world conquerors.
Henry Cabot Lodge
#50. The first time I was in London, I went to an English greasy spoon to get some breakfast and realised that all the waiters were speaking Italian. That's when it hit me what an international city this is.
Monica Bellucci
#51. I don't want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.
Gavin McInnes
#52. It is always a taut moment in a foreign country waiting to see if your English-speaking guide speaks English ...
Peg Bracken
#53. Who'd want to be a modernist writer in the English-speaking world?
Will Self
#54. 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
#55. I've never lived in an English-speaking country, ever, but I lived in Austria. So, my second language is German. And when I went to school, I had a lot of classes in English.
Edgar Ramirez
#56. The allegation that English girls had no conversation must be true; but theirs was a SPEAKING silence. Their eyes and smiles were eloquent! She hoped it would teach their own girls that they need not chatter like magpies.
Edith Wharton
#57. The Constitution was a reaffirmation of faith in the principles painfully evolved over the centuries by the English-speaking peoples. It enshrined long-standing English ideas of justice and liberty, henceforth to be regarded on the other side of the Atlantic as basically American.
Winston S. Churchill
#58. It is important to demonstrate to the unfree world that one of the privileges of democracies is to enjoy freedom of travel and intercourse and the exchange of knowledge and ideas. [Gerald Barry, from article in English Speaking World, 1950.]
Harriet Atkinson
#59. The Democratic Party is the - was the largest and most powerful institution supporting slavery in the English-speaking world. And it is the only one that has survived to the 21st century!
Sean Hannity
#60. If you see the Sopranos, you're not going to be speaking in the Shakespearean English.
Lucy Liu
#61. A number of Americans were used, most often unwillingly, by North Korea to arm spies with English-speaking skills so they could target American interests in South Korea and beyond.
Robert Jenkins
#62. That wasn't English she was speaking: it was the language of diplomacy.
Kevin Hearne
#63. When I speak English, I've been told, I have this patrician way of speaking that's very irritating. It's the whole class thing.
Kristin Scott Thomas
#64. Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#65. I think the world's a little smaller these days. With the Internet and the availability of people, the pool of English speaking actors - not just American actors, but Brits, Australians, New Zealanders, Irish. We're all up for grabs.
Sonya Walger
#66. I grew up in New York in an English-speaking environment.
Erik Estrada
#67. I chose English-speaking and English-thinking people to take decisions for Hindi programmes. It was a mistake.
Subhash Chandra
#68. I would love to occasionally do English-speaking films, but the script is as important for me as the director.
Audrey Tautou
#69. I hope the English-speaking world can see that I'm not only an Israeli actress.
Hani Furstenberg
#70. Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.
Willa Cather
#71. As you can see, the hyphen is a nasty, tricky, evil little mark that gets its kicks igniting arguments in newsrooms and trying to make everyone in the English-speaking world look like an idiot - it's the Bill Maher of punctuation.
June Casagrande
#72. Democracy today, especially in the English-speaking world, is a political system that specialises in positioning inadequate, unqualified and dubious types in leadership positions.
Gilad Atzmon
#73. Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.
William Bennett
#74. When you get into the third or fourth generation of Latino immigrants to the United States, you see the kids speaking more English than Spanish, and it's important that we don't lose our identity, our language.
Thalia
#75. We thought speaking in English meant you were more intelligent. We were wrong of course. It does not matter what language you choose, the important thing is the words you use to express yourself.
Malala Yousafzai
#76. Bird, hesitating, recalled a line from the English textbook he was reading with his students; a young American was speaking angrily: Are you kidding me? Are you looking for a fight?
Kenzaburo Oe
#77. I've received some English-speaking scripts, but I was not interested in them.
Audrey Tautou
#78. We call it Albion. It is the English-speaking world. The one where they kill babies in the womb, right? And here I was hoping we'd be famous for the Moonshot, or democracy, or the Beatles, or something.
John C. Wright
#79. Because, as any English-speaking tourist will tell you, if you speak slow enough, loud enough, and maintain good eye contact, eventually they'll understand.
Poppy Inkwell
#80. I only saw one English-speaking person all the way across Siberia.
Ian Frazier
#81. The security and happiness of all minority groups in South Africa depend on the Afrikaner. Whether they are English- or German- or Portuguese- or Italian-speaking, or even Jewish-speaking, makes no difference.
P. W. Botha
#82. Indeed I do not think we should be justified in using any but the more sombre tones and colours while our people, our Empire, and indeed the whole English-speaking world are passing through a dark and deadly valley.
Winston Churchill
#83. I look at myself, and I see a Spanish person who's trying to be understood by an English-speaking audience and is putting a lot of energy into that, instead of into expressing himself freely and feeling comfortable.
Javier Bardem
#84. When an international news organization covers a story in Somalia, Yemen, Sudan or wherever, they will fly a crew to go there, spend a few days, interact with some officials and analysts, most of the time English-speaking elite, and file the story and go home.
Wadah Khanfar
#85. It is the English-speaking nations who, almost alone, keep alight the torch of Freedom.
Winston Churchill
#86. Some were in Gaelic and some in English, used apparently according to which language best fitted the rhythm of the words, for all of them had a beauty to the speaking, beyond the content of the tale itself.
Diana Gabaldon
#87. I do pinch myself, like when shows in non-English speaking countries are sold out, and people are singing my lyrics. I don't think I'll ever lose that; I'm always appreciative every day of the support I have as an artist, because I'm not a commercial artist.
Xavier Rudd
#88. An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
Edith Wharton
#89. When I came back from Bolivia, my Spanish was in some ways as good as my English. I am rusty today. But I am comfortable talking in Spanish. I am not flawless or fluent, but I am comfortable. It takes me a day or two speaking a lot of Spanish to get back into a rhythm.
David Dewhurst
#90. Everywhere among the English-speaking race criminal justice was rude, and punishments were barbarous; but the tendency was to do away with special privileges and legal exemptions.
Albert Bushnell Hart
#91. 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
#92. In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music - you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards - they didn't get any money at first. They were all broke.
Iggy Pop
#93. The English-Speaking world is divided into those who have read 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' and those who are going to read them.
SUNDAY TIMES
#94. The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.
George Orwell
#95. If I spoke no English, my world would be limited to the Japanese-speaking community, and no matter how talented I was, I could never do business, seek employment or take part in public affairs outside that community.
S.I. Hayakawa
#96. We were a Western civilisation, an English speaking civilisation, both NZ and Australia, and we had all these influences coming from both Great Britain and America to us; sending us their culture in the shape and form of movies and television.
Richard O'Brien
#97. We, the English educated Indians, often unconsciously make the terrible mistake of thinking that the microscopic minority of the English-speaking Indians is the whole of India.
Mahatma Gandhi
#98. All around me I hear the pleasant chortle of Dutch. It sounds vaguely familiar, though I can't imagine why. Then it dawns on me. Dutch sounds exactly like English spoken backward! ...
I wonder if I recorded someone speaking Dutch and played that backward, it would sound like regular English!
Eric Weiner
#99. Most, actually, German actors have like some speaking of French. So, the French wasn't the problem. But, I was having a problem with them doing my dialogue in English. And it wasn't a matter of fluency.
Quentin Tarantino
#100. When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.
Henry David Thoreau
