You English Quotes

#1. You English are like mad bulls ... you see red everywhere! What on earth has come over you, to heap on us such suspicion as is unworthy of a great nation. I regard this as a personal insult ... You make it uncommonly difficult for a man to remain friendly to England.

Wilhelm II

#2. The count said in careful English, "That was perhaps not, as you English say, very sporting."
"Games are played to win," Cameron said. "And we're Scottish.

Jennifer Ashley

#3. How do you English Socialists believe in Empire like that?' Steele said to Holmes. 'Empire is inimical to Democracy and it has no right to exist in a free world.

James Aldridge

#4. You English have a saying which is close to my heart, for its spirit is that which rules our boyars: Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.

Bram Stoker

#5. You English words?
I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer

Edward Thomas

#6. You English palisade yourselves up behind 'must nots' and I commence to think it is a barren fortress in which you wall yourselves. - Caleb

Geraldine Brooks

#7. LOSER! You English lose ... I suppose he thought it was the most grievous insult he could hurl. But such a curse doesn't really have any effect on an English person - or a European - it seems to me. We know we're all going to lose in the end so it is deprived of any force as a slur.

William Boyd

#8. Only one god. Strange, that you English, who gather about you so many things, are content with one only.

Geraldine Brooks

#9. 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

#10. 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

#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. Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

Dean Wesley Smith

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

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

Minnie Driver

#19. 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

#20. Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

Christopher Hitchens

#21. 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

#22. I am happy to see you, Masood."
"Happy? Happy? What a pale, pathetic English word. You must not be 'happy' to see me. No, you must be enraptured, transported! You must be overjoyed. I have no use for 'happy'.

Damon Galgut

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. I give pleasure to you. Do not interfere..." #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

Olga Goa

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. '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

#33. 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

#34. I'm not sure I can take your advice. You are dealing with English Gentlemen. We are dealing with monsters.

Martin Buber

#35. 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

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

Roy Blount Jr.

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. Did you ask people to crime scenes on dates?

Maureen Johnson

#42. Just shut up and listen."
"Well since you ask so nicely ... ."
There was silence. I listened. He didn't say anything.
"Are we communicating through the Psychic Hotline or what?

Josh Lanyon

#43. We live in America,' he said. 'Everyone who speaks English understands you. How they interpret you is something else.

Carrie Fisher

#44. 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

#45. In England the more horses a nobleman has, the more popular he is. So long as the English are devoted to racing, Socialism has no chance with you.

Otto Von Bismarck

#46. Better not I tell you. You want to know what I do? I say doudou, if you have trouble you are right to come to me. And I kiss her. It's when I kiss her she cry - not before.

Jean Rhys

#47. You don't want to lose the foreign feel of a book entirely, but for me the prime requisite is to get it sounding good in English. If it sounds clumsy, readers will pounce on it of course.

Anthea Bell

#48. [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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. No studio in Hollywood wanted 'Cold Mountain.' None. No one wanted 'Ripley,' no one wanted 'The English Patient.' That tells you there isn't really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there.

Anthony Minghella

#52. With secret delight, he began teaching Bad Eye catastrophically bad English. From that day forward, when asked, "How are you?," Bad Eye would smilingly reply, "What the fuck do you care?

Laura Hillenbrand

#53. Pride! In English it is a Deadly Sin. But in Urdu it is fakhr and nazish - both names that you can find more than once on our family tree.

Kamila Shamsie

#54. I wish I were not sensual... I wish I had not got from my mother, or my father was it, this need to grasp and be grasped, because it drives me into the arms of idiots who want to crush me. Wonderful, idiotic, crushing in the night. Can't you just crush me in the night?

Howard Barker

#55. All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

#56. 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

#57. I was sent to a school with bosses for teachers- no Twain, only cane; check your dick you harry, no Dickens either, No Tom Sawyers no David Copperfields only Webster, master it for grammar, the Wren with a dash of Martini-Drink deep.

Aporva Kala

#58. English is much drier. You can get away with a lot less. Pathos, lyricism, these are things you have to tone down if you want the English version of the book to work.

Daniel Kehlmann

#59. If you write "judgement" you should also write "colour" and "tyre.

Paul Brians

#60. Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing
turn your toes out when you walk
And remember who you are!

Lewis Carroll

#61. You know the only rule you need to know to get on in this country? 'Never complain, never explain.

Amanda Craig

#62. The purpose of life is to be beautiful, to be bountiful, to be blissful, to be graceful and grateful. What a wonderful English word-grateful. If one is great and full, one is God. And whenever smallness faces you, you should be great, and full-full of that greatness.

Harbhajan Singh Yogi

#63. I grew up in a brick house. What's wrong with bricks? An Englishman took me aside and said, "You have to understand, all the bricklayers in England are Irish, and the English hate the Irish."

Carl Andre

#64. You'll be so busy with Bridge and what's-his-name that you'll forget all about your English mate, St. Clair."
"Ha! So you are English!" I poke him in the stomach.
He grabs my hand and we wrestle, laughing. "I claim ... no ... nationality.

Stephanie Perkins

#65. We always seem to be a bit surprised that our children are reflecting stuff that we are showing them. I don't know about you, but every movie that I saw when I was a kid, I emulated. I was Haley Mills for an entire summer and had an English accent.

Cheryl Ladd

#66. If you want to swim across the English Channel from England to France - you have to leave your doubt on the beach in England.

Lewis Gordon

#67. I went to study English for two reasons. Principally because when I was in university, studying drama wasn't considered an option. You couldn't get a degree course for it. And so many plays and things that I was interested in landed themselves in a broader spectrum of literature.

James Callis

#68. I speak as your native guide to the mysterious tribe called the English. Dress code is everything. You can be a card-carrying Nazi, you can pay gigolos to eat gnocchi out of your navel and you won't be pilloried
as long as you never, ever wear linen with tweed.

Kathy Lette

#69. Jesus is teaching and wants you to learn. This means you will be stretched. Jesus does not want you stuck in a bonehead English class, which I was for several years.

Jonah Books

#70. There is always that age-old thing about England and America being divided by a common language. You think that because we speak English and you speak English that you're bound to understand and like everything that we do. And of course you don't.

Rowan Atkinson

#71. Dad!' I'd complain when I lost track of what he was saying. 'Speak English.'

'Megyn, I will not lower my vocabulary to meet yours,' he said. 'You must raise yours to meet mine.

Megyn Kelly

#72. I saw 'Tintin' in Europe - it is 'Indiana Jones' on steroids. Unbelievable. What a fantastic movie. Steven Spielberg, you rock the house. And working with those young English guys like Edgar Wright, and also Peter Jackson; what a great combination.

Harvey Weinstein

#73. If you turned in a paper with writing on it, you were guaranteed a hook from Jake Epping of the LHS English Department, and if the writing was organized into actual paragraphs, you got at least a B-minus.

Stephen King

#74. Dieter, you're a brick!" I shouted. I couldn't help it. Dieter looked as pleased as punch. To him, being called a brick by an English native was probably more precious than a knighthood.

Alan Bradley

#75. Ultimately, to have a career in movies, to a certain extent, certainly in England, you can't sustain a career in just English movies.

Clive Owen

#76. Frieda, you despise English music. You know you do. And English art. And English literature, except Shakespeare, and he's a German.

E. M. Forster

#77. I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.

Michael Ondaatje

#78. No one's going to be able to operate without a grounding in the basic sciences. Language would be helpful, although English is becoming increasingly international. And travel. You have to have a global attitude.

Rupert Murdoch

#79. His English was exceptional. There was a glottal sound in his voice, but it was not harsh. I'd often asked him to help me with my sparse Arabic, trying to get my pronunciation of this or that word right. "Shukran." "Afwan." "Qumbula." Thank you. You're welcome. Bomb.

Kevin Powers

#80. The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.

E.L. Doctorow

#81. If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell 'friend,' I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend.

Richard P. Feynman

#82. There's a melody in everything. And once you find the melody, then you connect immediately with the heart. Because sometimes English or Spanish, Swahili or any language gets in the way. But nothing penetrates the heart faster than the melody.

Carlos Santana

#83. Latin, Greek, and English, plus a smattering of Italian and fucking French." "Fucking French, you say? Well . . ." "Oui," said I, in perfect fucking French.

Christopher Moore

#84. There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.

Martin Amis

#85. There's a word for this in English," he mused, still soft. "I can't recall it. I've made you a ... a fallen women. Yes?"
"Yes," I agreed, still smiling. "Thank you ever so much."
"It's been entirely my pleasure," he said in Romanian, and I turned my face into his sleeve and began to laugh.

Shana Abe

#86. If you're going to yell at me, do it in English, please. I'd like to understand the insult so I can frame an appropriately pithy response.

Chloe Neill

#87. On behalf of the newspaper industry I wish to announce some changes we're making to serve you better. When I say 'serve you better,' I mean 'increase our profits.' We newspapers are very big on profits these days. We're a business, just like any other business, except that we employ English majors.

Dave Barry

#88. Computers are everywhere and you can't even begin to function with a computer unless you have comprehension and an understanding of the English language.

Wally Amos

#89. I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

J.K. Rowling

#90. A little weird? That was freakin' Bizarroville."
He pauses and looks back at me.
"Are you speaking English?

Susan Ee

#91. It's funny how a film about a murderous old English toff can help you.

Jim Broadbent

#92. The four most important words in the English language are, "What do you think?" Listen to your people and learn.

J.W. "Bill" Marriott Jr.

#93. We sing in English, not mimicking some American rock singer's accent. That's just pretending to be something you ain't.

Joe Strummer

#94. If you could pick one word in the English language to describe the universe, what would it be? Why?"

Here's my response:

Unfair.

Jordan Sonnenblick

#95. When I was 19, I thought I wanted to be an English civil servant. It was the most exotic thing at the time - can you imagine, in the middle of the IRA bombing campaigns? I saw an ad inviting Irish applicants for an induction course, so I signed up.

Colm Toibin

#96. During his weekly address to the nation, President Obama discussed higher education and said, 'The most important skill you can sell is your knowledge.' Or as English majors working at Starbucks put it, 'No it's not.'

Jimmy Fallon

#97. In the NBA you need a little bit more than that when Jordan is front of you. You need a little bit more than that when it is Barkley or Karl Malone or Shaq or whoever else. You need a lot more than that frankly if you're the English kid who can't jump.

John Amaechi

#98. The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#99. That's how it is with the English: if you score against them you're a good player; if you don't, you're not.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic

#100. You guys put them all on a boat and sent them over here to North America a couple of hundred years ago." "The English maybe would do such a thing. Is what they did with the criminals, so maybe they would send you the smelly cats. But no the Italians. We would no be so cruel.

Lynsay Sands