English Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

Malcolm Bradbury

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

The world still consists of two clearly divided groups: the English and the foreigners. One group consists of less than 50 million people; the other of 3,950 million. The latter group does not really count.

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

Malcolm Bradbury

The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.

Margaret Halsey

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.

Robert Benchley

Never was isle so little, never was sea so lone,
But over the scud and the palm-trees an English flag was flown.

Rudyard Kipling

When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

Henry David Thoreau

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men; I am both glad and proud of having done so. Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life—many an hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet command the respect of every one but an English money-monger.

Friedrich Engels

When the Indians complain that the English have enslaved them it is as if drunkards complained that the spirit-dealers who have settled among them have enslaved them. You tell them that they might give up drinking, but they reply that they are so accustomed to it that they cannot abstain, and that they must have alcohol to keep up their energy. Is it not the same thing with the millions of people who submit to thousands or even to hundreds, of others — of their own or other nations? If the people of India are enslaved by violence it is only because they themselves live and have lived by violence, and do not recognize the eternal law of love inherent in humanity.

The English are very stupid, said Poirot. They think that they can deceive anyone but that no one can deceive them.

Agatha Christie

An English army led by an Irish general: that might be a match for a French army led by an Italian general.

George Bernard Shaw

Mutual understanding would be immensely facilitated by the use of one universal tongue. But which shall it be, is the great question. At present it looks as if the English might be adopted as such, though it must be admitted that it is not the most suitable. Each language, of course, excels in some feature.... A practical answer to that momentous question must perforce be found in times to come, for it is manifest that by adopting one common language the onward march of man would be prodigiously quickened. I do not believe that an artificial concoction, like Volapuk, will ever find universal acceptance, however time-saving it might be. That would be contrary to human nature. Languages have grown into our hearts.

The inherited stupidity of the race—sound English common sense.

Most English-speaking people … will admit that cellar door is "beautiful," especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful... Well then, in Welsh, for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.

J. R. R. Tolkien

The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched.

Henry David Thoreau

I want for India complete independence in the full English sense of that English term.

My personal religion enables me to serve my countrymen without hurting the English or, for that matter, anybody else.

As to the Delhi affair, [i. e., the Indian Rebellion of 1857] it seems to me that the English ought to begin their retreat as soon as the rainy season has set in in real earnest. Being obliged for the present to hold the fort for you as the Tribune's military correspondent I have taken it upon myself to put this forward. NB [nota bene; "take note"], on the supposition that the reports to date have been true. It's possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.