Top 100 Quotes About The English
#1. If Wellington epitomizes the English gentleman, Eisenhower epitomizes the natural American gentleman.
John Keegan
#2. If something goes wrong at the plant, blame the guy who can't speak English.
Dan Castellaneta
#3. It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.
Billy Collins
#4. And then the critics, going back to the novels of his maturity, found that their English had a nervous, racy vigour that eminently suited the matter.
W. Somerset Maugham
#5. It's very strange to be completely naked in public," said Jacob. "It isn't something Americans ordinarily do."
"I can't say it's very English, either," replied Henry.
"It's a Scottish thing, though, isn't it? With all the kilts and all that.
Caleb Crain
#6. My first restoration was on 'Napoleon,' trying to put the French version in with the English version, and it was most unsatisfactory.
Kevin Brownlow
#7. I wasn't saying you were heartbroken." I sound like English is a new language for me, the way I stutter out the words. "I just meant it was hard for me to ... to watch."
He neither confirms nor denies that he might or might not have been even a teeny bit heartbroken.
Susan Ee
#8. The expression Jake saw on all the faces, oldest to youngest, was the same: pure joy. Not just that, he thought, and remembered a phrase his English teacher had used about how some books make us feel: the ecstasy of perfect recognition.
Stephen King
#9. 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
#10. I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.
James Joyce
#11. You know what English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids.
H. Beam Piper
#12. I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.
Jo Walton
#13. 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
#14. On the basis of this information, it would be possible to argue that if everybody spoke English (or Chinese or Esperanto for that matter) everybody would be at war even more often.
Andrew Dalby
#15. And in repose one might have admired so fine a specimen of English manhood, until the foppish ways, the affected movements, the perpetual inane laugh, brought one's admiration of Sir Percy Blakeney to an abrupt close.
Emmuska Orczy
#16. My love of reading and the English language is something given to me by my parents, and I've passed it on to my children.
Corin Tucker
#17. 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
#18. If you go to France, you have to speakFrench. If you speak in English, no one looks at you. On the one hand we sayEnglish is a global language.
Raj Thackeray
#19. In Hollywood through the 50s, there were black, English, and Middle European housekeepers and maids.
Bill Condon
#20. And it occurred to me, standing there, just breathing with her, quiet settling around us, that those might be the three most beautiful words in the English language. We have time.
Ransom Riggs
#21. If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.
George Orwell
#22. On the day of the show, I sit down with someone that speaks very good English and someone who speaks the local language very well and work out what I'm going to say.
Phil Collins
#23. The typical Irish peasant ate about 10 pounds of potatoes each day and soon towered in physical size over their rural English equivalents who mainly ate bread.
Rashers Tierney
#24. All of our affairs, since the union of crowns, have been managed by the advice of English ministers, and the principal offices of the kingdom filled with such men, as the court of England knew would be subservient to their designs.
Andrew Fletcher
#25. My father was an Episcopal minister, and for 14 years my family lived in China, in a city called Wuchang. We four children spoke Chinese before we spoke English. We left when the communists came, in the early 1930s. I was about 5 years old.
Audrey Meadows
#26. I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.
Ken Bruen
#27. The English, by and large, being a crass and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe.
Terry Pratchett
#28. Baseball. If there's a more beautiful word in the English language. I have yet to hear it ... baseball has served as such a powerful link between Dad and me, and later between me and my son.
Tim Russert
#29. 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
#31. Bad people? What kind of bad people? Members of the Church of Satan? Insurance salesmen? People who don't speak English?
Wayne Gerard Trotman
#32. The only English patients I have ever known refuse tea, have been typhus cases; and the first sign of their getting better was their craving again for tea.
Florence Nightingale
#33. 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
#34. Kieran unfolded the letter and scanned the scrawled message....
'Beware an English assassin.'
He knew exactly what this meant.
Madeline Martin
#35. 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
#36. Our government should speak a common language with the American people - plain English.
Alan Siegel
#37. My joke is that my father was a minister and my mother was an English teacher, so I'm trained to see the world in terms of symbols, which is hard when you just want to make toast.
Libba Bray
#38. Famous in our circles is the story of the visiting English banker who in 1948 upon seeing our model 95 camera commented, 'Very interesting, but why would one want a picture in a minute?'
Edwin Land
#39. I'm working on a film called 'Bonnie.' Bonnie means water. It's in English, and it's dealing with a future world in a megacity - which is what the U.N. says we're going to be - but in this megacity, a city that runs out of water.
Shekhar Kapur
#40. A whore, we've established that, filthy, it goes without saying, but whatever else the hell I am, I AM NOT ENGLISH.
Elizabeth Wein
#41. If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English Opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves the punishment of bearing it.
Margaret Fuller
#42. I came to Los Angeles for the first time in 1994. I spoke no English. I only knew how to say two sentences: 'How are you?' and 'I want to work with Johnny Depp.'
Penelope Cruz
#43. Jessica swallowed. "I think you had better stick to English."
"But Italian is so moving," Dain said.
"To ho voluto dal primo che ti vedi." I've wanted you from the first moment I saw you.
"Mi tormenti ancora." You've tormented me ever since.
Loretta Chase
#44. The English should give Ireland home rule - and reserve the motion picture rights.
Will Rogers
#45. the English explorer Richard Burton told the story of an Englishman finding his new wife unconscious on the marital bed, having chloroformed herself. She had pinned a note to her nightdress which read: 'Mama says you're to do what you like.
Sam Miller
#46. The sky which had started out with such verve and spirit in the morning was beginning to lose its concentration and slip back into its normal English condition, that of a damp and rancid dish cloth.
Douglas Adams
#47. There is a story I always tell my students ... when I came for the 1st time to the US. I didn't speak English (Only Spanish) & I saw on every door the word "exit" which in Spanish means Success = Exito. And then I said :"No wonder Americans are winners ,every door they open leads to success
Pablo
#48. I haven't had any formal education. Through the grace of god, I am gifted in mathematics and the English language.
Shakuntala Devi
#49. The way I putted today, I must've been reading the greens in Spanish and putting them in English.
Homero Blancas
#50. 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
#51. Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion ...
Benjamin Franklin
#52. 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
#53. I feel very English. I'm proud of it. I wanted there to be a thread connecting everything, the songs, clothes, artwork, even the string arrangements. It all creates a certain atmosphere.
Gabrielle Aplin
#54. 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
#55. It's okay to be proud of your good English. But don't be proud of being poor at your Mother tongue. Only the scum of the earth do that.
Manasa Rao
#56. 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
#57. What has been termed 'correct' English is nothing other than the blatant legitimation of the white middle-class code.
Dale Spender
#58. The Australian fans are really friendly and personable; the sense of humour is a lot less dry than the English.
Tom Hopper
#59. 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
#60. I spent the period reading the first novel assigned for English. And wow. If I hadn't realized I was in France yet, I do now. Because Like Water for Chocolate has sex in it. LOTS of sex.
Stephanie Perkins
#61. We were very kindly received by the English merchants to whom my companion had letters, and we set ourselves to learn what was the real state of things in Mexico.
Edward Burnett Tylor
#62. 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
#63. There is abundant proof that the opening of our ports always tends to raise the price of foreign corn to the price in the English market, and not to sink the price of British corn to the price in the continental market.
Joseph Hume
#64. What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what's the world coming to, eh?
Dorothy L. Sayers
#65. If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.
Oscar Wilde
#66. 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
#67. In the States, the Abdication story, for example, is portrayed as The World Well Lost For Love while the English, of a certain type anyway, see it only as childish, irresponsible and absurd.
Julian Fellowes
#68. Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English ... ?
Chris Cleave
#69. If only ... the saddest words in the English language.
Kristan Higgins
#70. Five of the most exciting words in the English language: "What shall I read next?
Jason Erik Lundberg
#71. I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.
William Golding
#72. You Englishmen,' said Herr Wurter. 'You are all the same. Wherever you are you behave as if you were at home and your word was law.
Derek Raymond
#73. During the settling of the American colonies, it was said that the Spaniards would first build a church, the Dutch would first build a fort and the English a tavern. Welcome to Charleston, an English colony founded in 1670.
Mark R. Jones
#75. Remember: If you go for a walk with a friend in England, don't say a single word for hours; if you go for a walk with your dog, talk to it all the time.
George Mikes
#76. John Mitchel's famous declaration that God sent the blight but the English created the Famine.
Tim Pat Coogan
#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. England's civil war had ended in a consensus as the English discovered that they hated foreigners more than they hated their own countrymen.
Len Deighton
#79. The English have a proverb, 'Conscience makes cowboys of us all'.
Saki
#80. I went to Gettysburg College, where the famous Civil War battle was fought. I majored in English. I would've liked to major in writing, but they didn't offer a major in that.
Jerry Spinelli
#81. The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.
Oscar Wilde
#84. 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
#85. The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long life seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed.
..
Virginia Woolf
#86. I graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with an English literature degree and travelled for a year before going to work.
Natalie Massenet
#87. The English public doesn't really like Shakespeare; it prefers football.
Hesketh Pearson
#88. The English press, are so nosy, and the English seem to love that eavesdropping.
Michael Hutchence
#89. 'Jane Eyre,' when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.
Edward P. Jones
#90. 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
#91. But why have you dear English Jew whose forefathers fought to enter the country of Johnny Mill, the Stuart with a little heart, saunter in Haridwar, no pubs or fish and chips' counters here, only Ganga-Jal, -the holy ale- Quaff it for the spirit and carry it to the banks of Thames in a holy grail.
Aporva Kala
#92. 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
#93. When I was a kid, it was thought I would do something in the visual arts because I was always drawing, but when we emigrated to Australia from Holland when I was seven, I learnt the English language, and I fell in love with it.
Michel Faber
#94. 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
#95. We French-Canadians belong to one country, Canada: Canada is for us the whole world: but the English-Canadians have two countries, one here and one across the sea.
Wilfrid Laurier
#96. Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say that I had a few extraordinary English teachers in high school whom I still credit for their guidance.
Julia Glass
#97. I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: the most conscientious student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.
Northrop Frye
#98. 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
#99. If I can't find a project that I'm really interested in, I'll just go back to college where I've been studying art history and French. I'm also going to study English and philosophy - the whole curriculum!
Emmy Rossum
#100. It doesn't matter what the income level of your family is, or if English is the first or second language. It makes no difference. The bottom line is that every child can be an academic champion, an academic champion and a superstar in academics.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
