English Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English.

Sovereignty rests with me as an English MP and that's the way it will stay.

He knows, of course, that a criminal organization like the Verbover ring can't flourish without the ready services of bagman and secret lobbyists, without regular applications of grease and body English to the works of government.

I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.

Hunter S. Thompson

During my most recently controlled near-death experience, I got to interview William Shakespeare. We did not hit it off. He said the dialect I spoke was the ugliest English he had ever heard, fit to split the ears of groundlings. He asked if it had a name, and I said Indianapolis.

We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black as if bereaved of light.

Young Ireland, the Catholic Party and its newspaper organs in Dublin are trying to do all the mischief they can. They are praising the mutineers, and calling upon the Irish to follow their example. I think it will be advisable to call out and embody five thousand more Militia, making twenty thousand in all, and it would be best to bring over to England all the Irish regiments belonging to the Catholic counties, and to send English regiments to Ireland. Some of the Northern Irish regiments would be well left in Ireland. They are chiefly Protestants, and would be delighted to put down the Croppys if they should rise.

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston

We English people delight in a moral — not a moral to be deduced or inferred, but a nice, rounded, little moral, in all the starch of set sentences, and placed just at the end,

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

I like long and unusual words, and anybody who does not share my tastes is not compelled to read me. Policemen and politicians are under some obligation to make themselves comprehensible to the intellectually stunted, but not I. Let my prose be tenebrous and rebarbative; let my pennyworth of thought be muffled in gorgeous habilements; lovers of Basic English will look to me in vain.

Robertson Davies

Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most... are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so.

It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.

Of his painting 'Everyone Stands under His Own Dome of Heaven':

It is a man in his own universe. It [the painting] was a quotation of, taken out of Robert Musil's novel 'Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften'; how do you translate it in English? 'The Man without qualities', I think – the most important book of the 20th century I would say. So this is a quotation: Jeder Mensch soll nach seine Himmel gucken.... I meant there is no objective truth. So as I discovered later, there is no objective history. There is no history; each human being made its own history – has his own thoughts and his own world. And sometimes two domes touch each other, or cross each other, but everyone is alone with its own illusions and methods..

The French are a logical people, which is one reason the English dislike them so intensely. The other is that they own France, a country which we have always judged to be much too good for them.

As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.

Simple English is no one's mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

He was my mentor in a way — as a musician and as a businessman. He came to Turkey once and saw me on stage performing, and then he came up to me and said, "You've got to call me." I said, I would love to. And that was the first thing I did when I came to New York. Then we did an agreement, a deal, with him for the English albums.

'English fair play' is a fine expression. It justifies the bashing of the puny draper's assistant by the big hairy blacksmith, and this to the perfect satisfaction of both parties, if they are worthy the name of Englishman.

Never has so much indifference masqueraded as so much compassion; never has there been such willful blindness. The once pragmatic English have become a nation of sleepwalkers.

Anthony Daniels

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

Anthony Trollope

I will ask of you only the ability to read English and to think logically—no high school mathematics, and certainly no higher mathematics.

Freedom which in no other land will thrive,
Freedom an English subject's sole prerogative.

Fair and unfair are among the most influential words in English and must be delicately used.

It's become clear that absolutely everyone is either an art major or a science major at heart. No English or communications or business or politics or whatever: Only art and science. I'm an art major, I think. We can still play chess together, you know?

Let us pause to consider the English,
Who when they pause to consider themselves they get all reticently thrilled and tinglish,
Because every Englishman is convinced of one thing, viz.:
That to be an Englishman is to belong to the most exclusive club there is.