England Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

England and the United States are natural allies, and should be the best of friends.

Ulysses S. Grant

A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.

The true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of the newspapers.

England a fortune-telling host, As num'rous as the stars, could boast; Matrons, who toss the cup, and see The grounds of Fate in grounds of tea....

Charles Churchill

Manchester, one of the greatest, if not really the greatest mere village in England.

In my judgment, if we had pursued this course, the zones would have been of short duration. England would have been compelled to take her mines out of the North Sea in order to get any supplies from our country.

George W. Norris

If somebody tells you an obviously untrue story, on the Continent you would remark, "You are a liar, Sir, and a rather dirty one at that." In England you just say "Oh, is that so?" Or "That's rather an unusual story, isn't it?

When I read or hear of the mutual injuries of England and Ireland, I fancy it would have been a blessed thing had the sea never flowed between the two countries. Had they been all in one, surely there would have been more unity between them of interests and of feelings. But let us hope that days of peace and general enlightenment will arrive by ways past man's finding out.

New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch.

Anthony Burgess

The higher mental activities are pretty tough and resilient, but it is a devastating experience if the drive does stop. Some people lose it in their forties and can only stop. In England they are a source of Vice-Chancellors.

John Edensor Littlewood

It has been said that the only reason for leaving England is to give yourself the pleasure of coming back to it.

Patience Strong

The stars out there rule the sky more than in England, big and lustrous with the honour of having shone upon the ancients and been named by them.

G. M. Trevelyan

In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when the nations went a whoring they invariably ended by denying God, I think, and until all sexual irregularities and not some of them are penal the Church will never reconquer England.

I promise myself great pleasure from my visit to England. You know I am to stay with Dickens while in London; and beside his own very agreeable society, I shall enjoy that of the most noted literary men of the day, which will be a great gratification to me.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In commemoration of the fact that France was our ally in securing independence the citizens of that nation joined with the citizens of the United States in placing in New York harbor an heroic statue representing Liberty enlightening the world. What course shall our nation pursue? Send the statue of Liberty back to France and borrow from England a statue of William the Conqueror?

William Jennings Bryan

The inquiry in England is not whether a man has talents and genius, but whether he is passive and polite and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen's opinions in art and science. If he is, he is a good man. If not, he must be starved.

Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers... Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.

The people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement.

This was one of those perfect New England days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders.

Sarah Orne Jewett

If England led the rest of the world in the Industrial Revolution, it was despite, not because of her formal education system.

Poor England! thou art a devoted deer,
Beset with every ill but that of fear.
The nations hunt; all mock thee for a prey;
They swarm around thee, and thou stand'st at bay.

If the union between England and America is a powerful factor in the cause of peace, a new Triple Alliance between the Teutonic race and the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race will be a still more potent influence in the future of the world.

Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon

The only real river I knew was hardly more than a brook. It spilled through a tumbledown mill at the bottom of our road, opened into a little trouty pool, then ran on through water meadows over graveled shallows into Fakenham [England], where it slowed and deepened, gathering strength for the long drifts across muddy flatlands to Norwich and the North Sea.

Is it what you call civilization that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the
arbiter of the world? Clearly not. It is the inhabitants that have done this. It is an affair of race.... All is race, there is no other truth.

Benjamin Disraeli