English Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Take away from English authors their copyrights, and you would very soon take away from England her authors.

Anthony Trollope

Sometimes for me not throwing a tantrum is what running a marathon or swimming the English Channel must be like for others of a less-challenging emotional nature...

Alas! such is the miseducation of these days, it is only among those that are called the uneducated classes — those educated by experience — that you can look for a Man. Even among these, such a sight is growing daily rarer. My father, in several respects, has not, that I can think of, left his fellow. Perhaps among Scottish peasants what Samuel Johnson was among English authors. I have a sacred pride in my peasant father, and would not exchange him, even now, for any king known to me. Gold and the guinea stamp — the Man and the clothes of the man. Let me thank God for that greatest of blessings, and strive to live worthily of it.

I'm not against Hispanics. Most of them are Catholic and it's been a few hundred years since Catholics wanted to kill me for my religion. I'm willing to fast track for citizenship any Hispanic person who can speak English, doesn't have a criminal record and who is self-supporting without family on welfare, or who serves honorably for three years in our military. Those are the citizens we need.

Bad acting, like bad writing, has a remarkable uniformity, whether seen on the French, German, or English stages; it all seems modeled after two or three types, and those the least like types of good acting. The fault generally lies less in the bad imitation of a good model, than in the successful imitation of a bad model.

George Henry Lewes

Swinburne gave the coup de grace to English rhyme.

A statute of 1344 shows some weakness; but the statute of 1391 is memorable, not merely as being the Mortmain Code of three centuries, but as extending the rule of mortmain to all bodies, religious and secular alike, having perpetual succession. For this extension marks the definite recognition by English Law of the corporation, or, as it is sometimes called, the 'fictitious person' - the legal personality which is not restricted to the limits of individual life. The gradual evolution of this institution is one of the most fascinating chapters in legal history...

If English money was of the same value then as before, Hamburgh money must have risen in value. But where is the proof of this?

I really enjoy good murder mystery writers, usually women, frequently English, because they have a sense of what the human soul is about and why people do dark and terrible things. I also read quite a lot in the area of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about. I try to read as widely as I possibly can.

Madeleine L'Engle

The English Language is my bitch. Or I don't speak it very well. Whatever.

The movement of the middle classes for the abolition of slavery was virtuous, but it was not wise. It was an ignorant movement. It showed a want of knowledge both of the laws of commerce and the stipulations of treaties; and it has alike ruined the colonies and aggravated the slave trade... The history of the abolition of slavery by the English and its consequences, would be a narrative of ignorance, injustice, blundering, waste, and havoc, not easily paralleled in the history of mankind.

Benjamin Disraeli

I only said the English weren't famous for sex, that's all. Like the Boat Race, in out, in out, in out, then everyone collapsed over their oars.

Because you could not translate the word apartheid into the more universal language of English, the wrong connotation was given to it.

Let them try me. I shall have plenty to say about the Allies. I have some very good friends among the Americans and English, and the French industrialists, too. I have done nothing of which I am ashamed.

Look at your [English] ladies of quality—are they not forever parting with their husbands—forfeiting their reputations—and is their life aught but dissipation? In common genteel life, indeed, you may now and then meet with very fine girls—who have politeness, sense and conversation—but these are few—and then look at your trademen's daughters—what are they?—poor creatures indeed! all pertness, imitation and folly.

At the end of my first term's work, I attended the usual college board to give an account of myself. The spokesman coughed, and said a little stiffly: "I understand, Mr. Graves, that the essays which you write for your English tutor are, shall I say, a trifle temperamental. It appears, indeed, that you prefer some authors to others."

[Paul Patterson and I] soon got on the subject of the war, and I said flatly that I thought the Sun's course was not only ignorant and absurd, but also not a little disingenuous. It had gone over to the English in an abject and ignominious fashion, against all reason and all the obvious facts. Worse, it had yielded supinely to the most outrageous fiats of the Roosevelt censorship, and had even exceeded them. This shook Patterson somewhat, for he likes to think of himself as a news editor, and he insisted that in handling the war news the Sun had done good work.

He is the greatest musician of the English language, and exploring variations of familiar material is what musicians do all day.

Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled,
On Fame's eternal beadroll worthy to be filed.

- Report...

Has anyone here been raped and speaks English?

Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning; or, pure, ornate, and grotesque art in English poetry.

I never got used to the way the house Trots fell into the jargon back in Grimsby — I mean, on any other subject, like the death of the novel, or the sex life of the editor's secretary, they spoke ordinary English, but as soon as they started trying to get me to join the strike it was as if their brains had been taken out and replaced by one of those little golf-ball things you get in electric typewriters... "Betrayal"… "Confrontation"… "Management"… My God, you'd need a more supple language than that to describe an argument between two amoebas.

The craziest of all political systems, the unique dictatorship, found its earned end. History will note for eternity that the German people were not able on their own initiative to shake off the yoke of the National Socialists. The victory of the Americans, English and Russians was a necessary occurrence to disrupt the National Socialists' delusions and plans for world domination.

Friedrich Kellner

If Americans were not always aware that they were rich men individually, they were at all events well instructed, by old-world visitors who came to observe them with a certain air of condescension, that collectively at least their material prosperity was a thing to be envied even by more advanced and more civilized peoples. Therefore any man called upon to pay a penny tax and finding his pocket bare might take a decent pride in the fact, which none need doubt since foreigners like Peter Kalm found it so, that "the English colonies in this part of the world have increased so much in... their riches, that they almost vie with old England."

By the English common law, her husband was her lord and master. He had the custody of her person, and of her minor children. He could 'punish her with astick no bigger than his thumb,' and she could not complain against him.

Harriet Hanson Robinson