That English Quotes

#1. It was decided almost two hundred years ago that English should be the language spoken in the United States. It is not known, however, why this decision has not been carried out.

George Mikes

#2. Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you.

Barack Obama

#3. I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.

Anthony Burgess

#4. I want for India complete independence in the full English sense of that English term.

Mahatma Gandhi

#5. The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.

D.H. Lawrence

#6. The local natives were particularly curious to know why the English required such huge quantities of pepper and there was much scratching of heads until it was finally agreed that English houses were so cold that the walls were plastered with crushed pepper in order to produce heat.

Giles Milton

#7. The fact that [English] has shed most of the old grammatical forms which time has rendered useless and scarcely intelligible, has made English a model, pointing the way which must be followed in building the Interlanguage ...

Sylvia Pankhurst

#8. There are some sounds that English singers find quite difficult to manipulate.

Neville Marriner

#9. 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

#10. I would like better colouration of my legs, like a little less of that English mottled purple thing that makes it necessary to wear tights all the time.

Lily Cole

#11. I didn't want to fight a guy from England. What if I lose? Not that English guys aren't strong, but who wants to get beat up by a guy with that voice? That's not the most masculine voice to take a beating to.

Jay Mohr

#12. Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!

Roald Dahl

#13. It occurs to Blanche that English doesn't have French's useful distinction between libre, meaning that something's unconstrained, and gratuit, meaning that it costs nothing. Free thought, free speech, free love: the English word that Arthur was so fond of obscures the price of things.

Emma Donoghue

#14. Refecting on the high divorce rate in America as contrasted with England American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers

W. Somerset Maugham

#15. Then, as I stood in that English garden on the soft early summer night, I felt a surge of pure well-being engulf my whole body. I felt a shivering current of happiness and benevolence flow through me.

William Boyd

#16. I'm not a big disco guy. Some of that English techno-poppy stuff wouldn't get me in the mood either.

Jon Bon Jovi

#17. In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.

William Golding

#18. Expressing emotion is not so easy. He has to remind himself that English is not her first language. Expressing emotion can be difficult even when the words are familiar.

Elise Valmorbida

#19. It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case."

Sydney J. Harris

#20. People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me.

Harrison Birtwistle

#21. It is a well-known fact that English people never know anything. They only think. The only exception they know and they are sure about in the whole world is Marmite. 'Love it or hate it.' There are no other options; there is no space for grey space.

Angela Kiss

#22. Why is it that English, drama and music teachers are most often recalled as our mentors and inspirations? Maybe because artists are rarely members of the popular crowd.

Roger Ebert

#23. I said it in Hebrew - I said it in Dutch - I said it in German and Greek; But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much) That English is what you speak!

Lewis Carroll

#24. I believed that English-speaking people had a divine mission to civilize the world by making it western, democratic and Christian.

Luke Ford

#25. Never let the estate decrease in your hands. It is only by such resolutions as that that English noblemen and English gentlemen can preserve their country. I cannot bear to see property changing hands.

Anthony Trollope

#26. It is in that English Parliament the chains for Ireland are forged, and any Irish patriot who goes into that forge to free Ireland will soon find himself welded into the agency of his country's subjection to England.

Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa

#27. I have a handicap in that English is not my first language. So even though I'm a writer, I don't write anymore because it's just harder in English.

Patricia Riggen

#28. I used to think that English-speaking who conveniently look, dress, and act human only turned up in lazy science fiction. But as Carly and Frampton dematerialized, I became grimly aware of how well they'd also fit into a psychotic hallucination.

Rob Reid

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that.

Freeman A. Hrabowski III

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. What I like about Hollywood is that one can get along by knowing two words of English
SWELL and LOUSY.

Vicki Baum

#38. 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

#39. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!

Mary Gordon

#40. 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

#41. As an English actress constantly playing Americans, you already had to step way out of your box in that way.

Minnie Driver

#42. 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

#43. In high school, I once sang 'Let's Get It On' and 'Brown Sugar' with a band that included my English teacher and my math teacher.

Chris Pine

#44. Is it surprising that modern English land law should resemble a chaos rather than a system?

Edward Jenks

#45. If we do run, you'll need four legs to keep up with me today, Edwards. Oh that's right, you've been holding back because you're English, and it's not sporting to run down a girl. Well, this girl's been kicking your butt.

April White

#46. 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

#47. [T]ea, that uniquely English meal, that unnecessary collation at which no stimulants
neither alcohol nor meat
are served, that comforting repast of which to partake is as good as second childhood.

Angela Carter

#48. 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

#49. A whore, we've established that, filthy, it goes without saying, but whatever else the hell I am, I AM NOT ENGLISH.

Elizabeth Wein

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. You know, even growing up going to school, I had teachers that were against bilingual teaching. I never understood that. My parents always had me speak Spanish first knowing I was going to speak English in school.

Emily Rios

#55. 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

#56. For us Indians, I don't think English can ever exude that magic of emotions which our mother tongue can.

Kailash Kher

#57. I'll buy it right now, Jack," said an English voice, somehow familiar, "if you stop being such a fucking tosser, that is.

Neal Stephenson

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. John Mitchel's famous declaration that God sent the blight but the English created the Famine.

Tim Pat Coogan

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. Americans like to think 'Python' is how English people really are. There is an element of truth to that.

Eric Idle

#66. 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

#67. When you deal with a film that takes place in Europe, and you're going to work in English, you'd better work with European actors.

Norman Jewison

#68. The English press, are so nosy, and the English seem to love that eavesdropping.

Michael Hutchence

#69. '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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.

Roy Blount Jr.

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. We should not blur the lines between legal and illegal immigrants. Millions of people around the world have gone through the process to come here legally and they followed the rules that required them to pay a fee, learn English, and learn about American history and government.

Ken Calvert

#78. God gets it. When you reach out to him, he's not looking for fancy words that would impress your English teacher. He sees your heart. A groan, a look, a sigh - he speaks every language. He understands.

Max Lucado

#79. Out there in the spotlight you're a million miles away and every ounce of energy you try to give away as the sweat pours out your body like the music that you play.

Jon English

#80. The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.

Robert Fitzgerald

#81. He was in that state of highly respectful sulkiness which is peculiar to English servants.

Wilkie Collins

#82. I guess anime helped me understand the Japanese culture a little better and makes me want to honor certain language nuances that don't always translate to English.

Laura Bailey

#83. Dag insists that all dogs secretly speak the English language and subscribe to the morals and beliefs of the Unitarian church ...

Douglas Coupland

#84. Seriously, you don't have to know English. It'd be nice, a nice little plus. We don't want miracles. You don't have to know the country's language. But just some shapes, that's all. A square. A little geometry.

David Spade

#85. Has the casual use of profanity in English reached a high tide? That's a rhetorical question, but I'm going to answer it anyway: Fuck yeah.

Mary Norris

#86. That which constitutes the cause of the economic poverty of our age is what the English call over-production (which means that a mass of things are made which are of no use to anybody, and with which nothing can be done).

Leo Tolstoy

#87. the moment he'd seen that female he'd forgotten his own name, most of his English vocabulary, and seventy-five percent of his sense of balance.
Instant. Cosmic. Attraction.

-Trez's thoughts about Selena

J.R. Ward

#88. I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.

Christopher Hitchens

#89. From William of Orange to William Pitt the younger there was but one man without whom English history must have taken a different turn, and that was William Pitt the elder.

Albert Bushnell Hart

#90. I'd been trying for a while to get parts that weren't just the English bad guy, so it was quite refreshing to be playing someone who was a compassionate, decent guy.

Sean Bean

#91. 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

#92. 'Othello' was my first Shakespearean discovery. I was obsessed with drama at school, and I studied the play for my English GCSE. Desdemona is the part that everyone wants, but Iago's wife Emilia is the one I've always been drawn to.

Michelle Dockery

#93. I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.

F. Sionil Jose

#94. [Dennis Mathis] was very sensitive about keeping the unique way that I spoke English - it had a lot of Mexicanisms or Mexican syntax. So you keep it in because it's adding something unique.

Sandra Cisneros

#95. Being blonde means people decide on sight that you are much prettier and nicer than you really are, just as Americans automatically add 10 points to someone's IQ when they hear an English accent. Fact.

Rachel Johnson

#96. I constantly watch 'The Simpsons' and an English cartoon called 'The Raccoons' and 'Gummi Bears.' I was obsessed with ninja films, and the 'Teenage Mutant Nina Turtles,' I used to love that as well.

Matt Smith

#97. I don't know why that is, but English politics is just so overly white. It's very much about the class structure.

Daniel Radcliffe

#98. The story of the English writing system is so intriguing, and the histories behind individual words so fascinating, that anyone who dares to treat spelling as an adventure will find the journey rewarding.

David Crystal

#99. I swear on Peter Stuyvesant's peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston's communitarian English majors.

Sarah Vowell

#100. It has always been very difficult for writers to survive commercially in India because the market was so small. But that's not true at all any more. It's one of the world's fastest growing and most vibrant markets for books, especially in English.

Aravind Adiga