English Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Spiro Agnew

Thomas Beecham

Robert Benchley

William Blackstone

Roy Blount, Jr.

Malcolm Bradbury

Rupert Brooke

Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

Roy Blount, Jr.

The definition of self-respect contains a clause to include pitiless contempt for some other class. … English society is impregnated from top to bottom with this spirit. The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell.

Aleister Crowley

Quoting, like smoking…is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then…I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.

Carolyn Heilbrun

At first the English were very surprised by our disregarding the Hague Convention. But from 1916 onward they used at least as much poison as we did.

Now one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one's house. A man's house is his castle!

English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.

Malcolm Bradbury

But the nature of my main work in chemistry can be better represented by more than 280 English publications, of which roughly 200 concern the theory of chemical reactions and related subjects.

The growth of art seems to be in cycles, and often its vigorous lifetime is restricted to a century or two. The periods of distinctive drama, Greek, English, Spanish, fall within such a limit; the schools of painting and sculpture likewise; and, in poetry, the Victorian age or the school of Pope will serve as examples.

George Edward Woodberry

The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.

I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.

Malcolm Bradbury

The English approach to ideas is not to kill them, but to let them die of neglect.

Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.

Van Wyck Brooks

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major.

Stephen E. Ambrose

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
'My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

I can not be a traitor, for I owe him no allegiance. He is not my Sovereign; he never received my homage; and whilst life is in this persecuted body, he never shall receive it. To the other points whereof I am accused, I freely confess them all. As Governor of my country I have been an enemy to its enemies; I have slain the English; I have mortally opposed the English King; I have stormed and taken the towns and castles which he unjustly claimed as his own. If I or my soldiers have plundered or done injury to the houses or ministers of religion, I repent me of my sin; but it is not of Edward of England I shall ask pardon.

William Wallace

Many Continentals think life is a game; the English think cricket is a game.

I was well warned about English food, so it did not surprise me, but I do wonder sometimes, how they ever manage to prise it up long enough to get a plate under it.

Margaret Halsey

The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.

Malcolm Bradbury

This is the criminal left that belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary. The criminal left is not a problem to be solved by the Department of Philosophy or the Department of English—it is a problem for the Department of Justice…. Black or white, the criminal left is interested in power. It is not interested in promoting the renewal and reforms that make democracy work; it is interested in promoting those collisions and conflict that tear democracy apart.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.