England Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Oatmeal indeed supplies the common people of Scotland with the greatest and best part of their food, which is in general much inferior to that of their neighbours of the same rank in England.

The outsider will say, "in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world." And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child's ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.

I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man: wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morningwith a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.

Henry David Thoreau

Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget.
For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.

G. K. Chesterton

In New England they once thought blackbirds useless, and mischievous to the corn. They made efforts to destroy them. The consequence was, the blackbirds were diminished; but a kind of worm, which devoured their grass, and which the blackbirds used to feed on, increased prodigiously; then, finding their loss in grass much greater than their saving in corn, they wished again for their blackbirds.

Benjamin Franklin

When it was first proposed to establish laboratories at Cambridge, Todhunter, the mathematician, objected that it was unnecessary for students to see experiments performed, since the results could be vouched for by their teachers, all of them of the highest character, and many of them clergymen of the Church of England.

Bertrand Russell

I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers can strike when they want to … I like the system that lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere.

Abraham Lincoln

Cannot you tell that? Every fool can tell that. It was the very day that young Hamlet was born, he that is mad and sent into England." "Ay, marry, why was he sent into England?" "Why, because he was mad. He shall recover his wits there, or, if he do not, it's no great matter there." "Why?" "'Twill not be seen in him there. There the men are as mad as he.

William Shakespeare

They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.

PATIOKIM: In Russia we face facts.
EDSTATON: In England, sir, a gentleman never faces any fact if they are unpleasant facts.
PATIOKIM: In real life, all facts are unpleasant.

George Bernard Shaw

Now no way can I stray;
Save back to England, all the world's my way.

William Shakespeare

The Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.

I reverently believe that the maker who made us all makes everything in New England, but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerks factory who experiment and learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take their custom elsewhere if they don't get it.

The condition-of-England question is a practical one. The condition of England demands a hero, not a poet.

Henry David Thoreau

But since he stood for England And knew what England means, Unless you give him bacon You must not give him beans.

G. K. Chesterton

In England, philosophers are honoured, respected; they rise to public offices, they are buried with the kings...In France warrants are issued against them, they are persecuted, pelted with pastoral letters: Do we see that England is any the worse for it?

England produces under favorable conditions of ease and culture the finest women in the world. And, as the men are affectionate and true-hearted, the women inspire and refine them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

That Cabot merely landed on the uninhabitable shore of Labrador gave the English no just title to New England, or to the United States generally, any more than to Patagonia.

Henry David Thoreau

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway cuttings smothered in wild flowers…the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

All I would say is, that I can go abroad without your family coming forward to favour me, - in short, with a parting Shove of their cold shoulders; and that, upon the whole, I would rather leave England with such impetus as I possess, than derive any acceleration of it from that quarter.

Charles Dickens

Ethiopia has always held a special place in my own imagination and the prospect of visiting attracted me more strongly than a trip to France, England and America combined. I felt I would be visiting my own genesis, unearthing the roots of what made me an African. Meeting the emperor himself would be like shaking hands with history.

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so.

Henry David Thoreau

In the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone-and most men save Englishmen despaired of England's life-he [Churchill] mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.

John F. Kennedy

Winds of the World, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro—
And what should they know of England who only England know?—
The poor little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag.

Rudyard Kipling