Top 100 Quotes About The English
#1. But for the first time, I don't feel like the English language has developed enough letters in the alphabet to adequately express the words I want to say to you.
Colleen Hoover
#2. I know I'm not known as method. By nature I'm not a brooder. What I continue to use is a mixture of the English school, which is traditionally outside-in, and the more American way of working from the inside out.
Hugh Jackman
#3. Scots are Jocks,WelshmenTaffies, and Irishmen Paddies or Micks but?it is noticeable there is no similar designation for the English.
Anna Pavlova
#4. The chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of the Indian peoples by the English lies in this very absence of a religious consciousness and of the guidance for conduct which should flow from it - a lack common in our day to all nations East and West, from Japan to England and America alike.
Leo Tolstoy
#5. American naturalist William Morton Wheeler made the English term popular as the study of "habits and instincts."11
Frans De Waal
#8. He seems to have declared war on the King's English as well as on the English king.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#9. Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
Robert Benchley
#10. There is no word in the English language for the feeling someone gets when they suddenly realize they're standing next to an unholy monster impersonating a human. Monstralization, maybe?
David Wong
#11. One. Word.
NO.
No is a powerful word. To me, it's the single most powerful word in the English language. Said clearly, strongly and with enough frequency and force, it can alter the course of history.
Shonda Rhimes
#12. He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.
Angela Carter
#14. The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain.
Bill Bryson
#15. That would have been taken out of the Munrowe voice two or three generations ago through being educated at schools that modelled themselves on the English public-school system, even if they were in Scotland.
Alexander McCall Smith
#16. If I were to search for logic, I would not look for it among the English upper class.
Lady Violet
#17. Everything depends on whether we have for opponents those French tricksters or those daring rascals, the English. I prefer the English. Frequently their daring can only be described as stupidity. In their eyes it may be pluck and daring.
Manfred Von Richthofen
#18. So in all humours sportively I range; My muse is rightly of the English strain, That cannot long one fashion entertain.
Michael Drayton
#19. I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.
Barbara Kingsolver
#20. I love to laugh, it's my main thing. I love to abuse the English language.
Dan Fogelberg
#21. There are only about 30,000 really important books in the world. I suppose about 5,000 of them were written in the English language, and 5,000 more have been translated. - Roger Mifflin
Christopher Morley
#22. The English alphabet is pure insanity ... , It can hardly spell any word in the language with any degree of certainty.
Mark Twain
#23. The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.
V.S. Pritchett
#24. I know that sounds odd, but I have always felt that the English love children as long as they are polite, quiet, and well behaved. Americans seem to love children however they behave.
Jane Green
#25. The ten most powerful two-letter words in the English language are: If it is to be, it is up to me.
Harvey MacKay
#26. 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
#27. No damsel was ever in more distress, no dray horse more flogged, no defenseless child more drunkenly abused than the English language today. And
Robert Hartwell Fiske
#28. The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.
Ian McEwan
#29. The English was really my mother, it was never me. Being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French.
Charlotte Gainsbourg
#30. Regret; The saddest word in the English language.
Tonya Hurley
#31. The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
George Bernard Shaw
#32. I tell you Wellington is a bad general, the English are bad soldiers; we will settle this matter by lunch time.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#33. It is the English, not their Government; for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other smarmy traitors.
Enoch Powell
#34. the English drinking their 'alf and 'alf out of pewter mugs, the French drinking their claret out of very thin glasses, while our Russian shipmates and ourselves drank something harder out of thick glasses which were very small at the bottom.
Charles Erskine
#35. I have always felt cookbooks were fiction and the most beautiful words in the English language were 'room service.
Erma Bombeck
#36. It's soul force that removed the English from India. It's soul force that brought down the Berlin Wall. It's soul force that gave life to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle for civil rights.
Marianne Williamson
#37. Everything has changed. When I was at school and was told I had better learn English, I said: What for? The English are a hell of a long way away!
Juan Manuel Fangio
#38. The English are terribly lazy about fighting. They like to get it over and done with and then set up a game of cricket.
Stephen Leacock
#39. I find the English amazing how they got over 7/7. There were no multiple memorials with people sobbing as they would have been in America. There, they are constantly scaring people, but at the same time, people think nothing of going to see a therapist.
Gwyneth Paltrow
#40. The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.
George Bernard Shaw
#41. The English don't go in for imagination: imagination is considered to be improper if not downright alarmist.
Martha Gellhorn
#42. The English country house is certainly an icon of British culture.
Julian Fellowes
#43. There are reasons for believing that the English increase will far surpass others, and that the diffusion of the United States will ultimately produce the general population of America.
Ezra Stiles
#44. As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.
Albert J. Nock
#45. May cause drowsiness.' - the most beautiful words in the English language. Once it was 'do you have a t-shirt I can borrow?' Now it's 'may cause drowsiness.
David Nicholls
#46. I don't think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.
John Fowles
#47. Don't be ridiculous. Only one of the most condescending phrases in the English language ... and
Christine Pope
#48. Personally I crave not for 'independence', which I do not understand, but I long for freedom from the English yoke.
Mahatma Gandhi
#49. 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
#50. I believe it is our values and our ideals that ultimately bind us together as a nation. But it is the English language which serves as the means by which we can communicate these values to those around us. Our common language, English, is that which unites us.
Asa Hutchinson
#51. I believe in the capacity of India to offer nonviolent battle to the English rulers.
Mahatma Gandhi
#52. Few people know anything of the English history but what they learn from Shakespear; for our story is rather a tissue of personal adventures and catastrophes than a series of political events.
Elizabeth Montagu
#53. I'm not keen on the English way of eating outside, on the street. I want food that is clean, not impregnated with toxic fumes.
Marie Helvin
#55. I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.
Chinua Achebe
#56. Your great country is wonderful at stealing pieces of history and using it for its own purposes, so there didn't seem to be anything particularly unusual about it but the English were incredibly exercised about it.
Michael Apted
#57. They immediately spent a moment in bemused silence in honor of the perilous little paradox that was the English female
Julie Anne Long
#58. If the word 'No' was removed from the English language, Ian Paisley would be speechless.
John Hume
#59. I do not speak the English so good, but then I speak the driving very well.
Emerson Fittipaldi
#60. The English language is the one thing the Commonwealth still has in common.
Niall Ferguson
#61. You know what you do? You know how rain takes the colour out of everything? That's what you do to the English language. You blur it every time you open your mouth.
John Fowles
#62. 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
#63. I think in English history a very interesting character is John Lilburne. Very interesting character because of the way he managed to develop the whole debate about the English civil war into something very different.
Jeremy Corbyn
#64. There are no two words in the English language more harmful than good job,
J.K. Simmons
#65. The only thing I can say that is wonderful about my mother is she forced me to learn three verses of the Bible every day of my life, and I've read the Bible now five times and it taught me the English language.
Bryce Courtenay
#66. I'm Vincent," Obinze said, when they met in the back room. "I'm Dee." A pause. "No, you're not English. You can pronounce it. My real name is Duerdinhito, but the English, they cannot pronounce, so they call me Dee." "Duerdinhito," Obinze repeated. "Yes!" A delighted smile.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#67. You must learn to live as I do - in the face of constant criticism, opposition and censure. That, sir, is the English way.
Susanna Clarke
#68. It is strange to an American that the English, who love dogs and rarely eat them, nevertheless are brutal with vegetables. It is just one of those national differences which are unfathomable.
John Steinbeck
#69. I'm one of those people that feels that Americans that shouldn't do Shakespeare ... The rhythms of the English language and the mannerisms of the English speech seems to work effortlessly with William Shakespeare, but when Americans do it, something seems stuck.
Nicolas Cage
#70. A case could be made, in fact, that the English were the first victims of the British empire: without their conquest, that empire could not have been built.
Paul Kingsnorth
#71. No one lacked imagination like the English. Yet he could not dismiss the notion that this lass dressed in breeches could be the seer his grandmother foretold. Finding an English lass lying on a Scottish hillside so many miles from the border was strange enough to have a touch of magic about it.
Margaret Mallory
#72. Nowhere is the English genius of domesticity more notably evident than in the festival of afternoon tea. The [ ... ] chink of cups and the saucers tunes the mind to happy repose.
George Gissing
#73. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead.
William S. Burroughs
#74. The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.
George Orwell
#75. I am an atheist. I was born a Catholic, but after I had traveled to Northern Ireland with some Catholic friends, and we had a horrible experience with the English Protestant police, I lost all taste for formal religion.
Guy Laliberte
#76. She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did not translate into the English language, or into any other she knew: they were things that accumulated, solidly, knocked against each other, heaped and slipped.
A.S. Byatt
#77. So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#78. George Orwell once blamed the demise of the English language on politics. It's quite possible he never read a prospectus.
Arthur Levitt Jr
#79. But even we, with our supposed mastery of the English language, were not immune to the shortcoming of our vocabularies.
Words can only help you if you speak them.
Bianca Phipps
#80. Never had a decent report in his life!" Tony repeated, hardly able to believe the words. He was thinking, in shocked surprise, that even Tante Bettina did not know how mad the English could be.
Constance Savery
#81. The English have a wellspring of comedy that will never be exhausted: the combination of bestial urges and excellent manners.
David Edelstein
#83. The English word "coral" also comes from Greek, meaning "what becomes hard in the hand," "the maiden or nymph of the sea," or "the heart of the sea.
Eric H. Borneman
#84. If we don't get a good day's work out of you, we'll maroon you.
He ignored Barnaby's raised eyebrow. They'd never marooned anybody before, even the English nobles they hated, but Gideon meant to put the fear of God into the man.
Sabrina Jeffries
#85. I'm fully aware," Firth told a reporter for the English magazine Now, "that if I were to change professions tomorrow, become an astronaut and be the first man to land on Mars, the headlines in the newspapers would read: 'Mr. Darcy Lands on Mars.
Colin Firth
#86. The truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion.
Walt Whitman
#87. My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child, But I am black as if bereaved of light.
William Blake
#88. I'm sorry.' The two most inadequate words in the English language.
Beth Revis
#89. I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources
Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.
Umberto Eco
#90. The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue.
Eric Alterman
#91. Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?
Erica Jong
#92. The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.
Dorothy Parker
#93. I resist the urge to raise my hand and utter the four most reassuring words in the English language: I know a guy.
Sarah Vowell
#94. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them.
Jack London
#95. The English winter is long, cold and wet, just like the English summer
Benny Bellamacina
#96. I don't think you should make so many off-colour jokes about him becoming a cuckold. You're only getting away with it because he doesn't know what it means.' 'That's the beauty of the English language. One can wrap insults inside elegance, like popping anchovies into pastry.
Christopher Fowler
#97. The English language is more complex than calculus because numbers don't have nuances.
Andy Rooney
#98. A foreign observer is struck by our gentleness: by the orderly behaviour of the English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling, the willingness to form queues.
George Mikes
#100. What finally scuppered Napoleon's Europe was of course the fatal combination of the English Channel and the Russian winter; the same unlikely partnership that also did for Hitler's Europe.
Andrew Roberts
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