English Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We are English, and I expect you to behave as such. No more crying.

Ludendorff: The English soldiers fight like lions.
Hoffman: True. But don't we know that they are lions led by donkeys.

The Dash. Somehow this invaluable tool is widely regarded as not quite proper — a bumpkin at the genteel dinner table of good English. But it has full membership and will get you out of many tight corners.

William Zinsser

When I was a boy and refused to speak Spanish (because I spoke English), then could not speak Spanish from awkwardness, then guilt, Mexican relatives criticized my parents for letting me lose it —my culture, they said.

Richard Rodriguez

The English, although partakers in the most variable and quixotic climate in the world, never become used to its vagaries, but comment upon them with shock and resentment as if all their lives had been spent in the predictable monsoon.

A group came to the hospital to rescue me. I could hear them speaking in English but I was still very afraid. Then a soldier came into the room. He tore the American flag from his uniform and he handed it to me in my hand. And he told me "We're American soldiers, and we're here to take you home."
And I looked at him and I said "Yes, I am an American soldier too."

Nine English traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the 19th century.

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.

We completely ignore the human value of the information. A selection of 100 letters is given a certain information value, and we do not investigate whether it makes sense in English, and, if so, whether the meaning of the sentence is of any practical importance. According to our definition, a set of 100 letters selected at random (according to the rules of Table 1.1), a sentence of 100 letters from a newspaper, a piece of Shakespeare or a theorem of Einstein are given exactly the same informational value.

Léon Brillouin

I thought English is a strange language. Now I think French is even more strange. In France, their fish is poisson, their bread is pain, and their pancake is crepe. Pain and poison and crap. That's what they have every day.

He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more... well, pleasant.

I wanted English-language readers to savor its humor, its melancholy, its originality, its intellectual and esthetic complexity; I wanted them to know why the entire world thinks this is a great masterwork by an incomparable novelist.

What is it about the English countryside — why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?

The English mind is intelligent rather than intellectual. The French are intellectual in the sense that the intellect is emancipated and left free to run its own course.

Ralph Barton Perry

Perhaps American English will have an equivalent for the lovely Japanese expression for a girl's first menstruation, 'the year of the cleavage of the melon,' or for the ancient Indian, 'flower growing in the house of the god of love.'

I wish the English still possessed a shred of the old sense of humour which Puritanism, and dyspepsia, and newspaper reading, and tea-drinking have nearly extinguished.

If the English want a king, it is their business. If the Russians want communism, it is their business. If the Americans want our form of government, it is our business.

Ethel Rosenberg

The Italians are said to be noisy and to gesticulate, but that is a libel dreamed up by the English.

French: why does this language even exist? Everyone there speaks english anyway.

... the intensity of the indignation was in direct proportion to a White's distance from the Indian. On the frontier, the Indian was regarded as a besotted savage; but along the eastern seaboard, where the Spaniards, Dutch, English, and later Americans had long since exterminated all the Indians, philosophers and divines began to defend the Red Man.

My own unryhmed cadences, and those of other writers are a reversion to the real English tradition of Cynewulf.

Personally I wish the police had truncheoned the English fans to death, but I can't really say that on the record.

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

This made no sense to me, probably because I speak English and have never had a head injury.

Please help me, in order to get us invited [to the United States]. Helma [his wife] will then come later and I will work there and soon pay back the people who lend me the money. But finally I must get out of this internment [because the English mistrusted Schwitters, being a German] and further away from Norway, I want to be with all of you. Please get it done quickly and write to me about the outcome. Maybe my art is in danger and I, of course, with it. At last I would like to work on my abstracts again and find appreciation for them. Who knows what will happen?

Kurt Schwitters