English

I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live?

—Walcott, Derek Alton

I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.

—Keats,John

An English homeögrey twilight poured On dewy pasture, dewy trees, Softer than sleepöall things in order stored, A haunt of ancient Peace.

—Tennyson

Dr Johnson's morality was as English an article as a beefsteak.

—Hawthorne, Nathaniel

How beautifully the English fight! But they must give way.

—Napoleon I

Divide not between Protestant and Papist. Divide not nationally, betwixt English and Irish. The King makes no distinction betwixt you.

—Strafford,Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of

We're bought and sold for English gold, Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

—Burns, Robert

Canada could have enjoyed: English government, French culture, And American know-how. Instead it ended up with: English know-how, French government, And American culture.

—Colombo,John Robert

I have chased the English out of France more easily than my fathereverdid, for my fatherdrovethemout by force of arms, whereas I have driven them out with venison pies and good wine.

—Louis XI

He resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle†to arm the nation, not only with weapons but also with the mace of honor, creating in every English breast a soul beneath the ribs of death. 544

—Manchester,William Raymond

J'adore ce cricket; c'est tellement Anglais. I do so love cricketöit's so very English.

—Bernard

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing- fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.One of the dominant facts in English life during the past three-quarters of a century has been the decay of ability in the ruling class.

—Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair

And for ther is so gret diversite In Englissh and in writing of oure tonge, So prey I God that non myswrite the, Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge. And red wherso thow be, or elles songe, That thow be understonde,God I biseche!

—Chaucer, Geoffrey

You were English and not English. It took time to realize that England was far away.

—Hyde, Robin pseudonym of IrisGuiver Wilkinson

The English are all right. They're quiet, they're slow, they count things carefully, they hesitateöand I'm switching to their track.

—Walesa, Lech

The English, the English, the English are best! I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest!

—Flanagan, Bud stage name of Robert Winthrop

   When it comes to getting things wrong, the English are born masters.

—Vidal, Gore originally Eugene Luther Vidal,Jr

Les Anglais, c'est dro"  le quand me"  me comme de¤  gaine, c'est mi-cure¤  , mi-gar c° onnet. The English are funnyand peculiar, half-clergymen and half-little boys.

—Destouches

The English are used to suffrage; it istheir panacea for all that goes wrong with them.

—Carlyle,Thomas

English artists are usually entirely ruined by residence in Italy.

—Ruskin,John

English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave.

—Greer, Germaine

I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world. 148

—Bradbury, Malcolm Stanley

The English conquered us; but theyare far from being our equals.

—Napoleon I

There are English counties like hunting-tunes Played on the keys of a postboy's horn, But I will remember where I was born.

—Bene¤  t, StephenVincent

The English country gentlemangalloping aftera fox^the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

—Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills

   Les Anglais, a'   la ve¤  rite¤  , ajoutent par ci, par la'  , quelques autres mots en conversant; mais il est bien aise¤   de voir que God-dam est le fond de la langue. In truth, the English do add here and there other words when speaking, but it is obvious that Goddamn is the basis of their language.

—Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de

The English don't raise their voices, Arthur, although they may have other vulgarities.

—Hellman, Lillian Florence

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it soundslike.It isimpossible foran Englishmanto openhis mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

—Shaw, George Bernard

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.

—Bradbury, Malcolm Stanley

For the cleansing of that horror, if cleanse it they could, I would welcome the English in suzerainty over Scotland till the end of time. I would welcome the end of Braid Scots and Gaelic, our culture, our history, our nationhood under the heels of a Chinese army of occupation if it could cleanse the Glasgow slums, give a surety of food and playöthe elementary right of every human beingöto those people of the abyss†

—Gibbon, Lewis Grassic

Once upon a time the English knew who they were.

—Pavlova, Anna

We have room in this country but for one flag, the Stars and Stripes.We have room for but one loyalty, loyalty to the United States.We have room for but one language, the English language.

—Roosevelt,Theodore

During my seven years in office,I was in love with seventeen million French women† I know this declaration will inspire irony and that English language readers will find it very French.

—Giscard d'Estaing,Vale¤  ry

English life, while very pleasant, is rather bland. I expected kindness and gentilityand I found it, but there is such a thing as too much couth.

—Perelman, S(ydney) J(oseph)

The laws of cricket tell of the English love of compromise between a particular freedom and a general orderliness, or legality.

—Cardus, Sir Neville

I hope we English will long maintain our grand talent pour le silence.

—Carlyle,Thomas

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

—Jarrell, Randall

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

—Chandler, Raymond

The Englishmay not likemusicöbuttheyabsolutely love the noise it makes.

—Beecham, SirThomas

An English peer of the right sort can be bored nearer to the point where mortification sets in, without showing it, than anyone else in the world.

—Plum

English plays, Atrocious in content, Absurd in form, Objectionable in action, Execrable EnglishTheatre!

—Goethe,JohannWolfgang von

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

—Fenton,James

Thisbook isnot about heroes.Englishpoetry isnot yet fit to speak of them.

—Owen,Wilfred

   Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, Or English poets who grew up on Greek (I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

—Rogers,Will

English policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boathook to avoid collisions.

—of Salisbury

[The] English proletariat is becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimatelyat the possession of a bourgeoisaristocracyand a bourgeoisproletariat as well as a bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.

—Engels, Friedrich

Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums,Paul learned, who find prison so soul-destroying.

—Waugh, Evelyn Arthur StJohn

   The moment that the very name of Ireland ismentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots.

—Smith, Rev Sydney

In an English ship, they say, it is poor grub, poor pay, and easy work; in an American ship, good grub, good pay, and hard work. And this is applicable to the working populations of both countries.

—Lombardi,Vince(ntThomas)

If there is writing on Hadrian's Wall, it reads that the English should leave Scotland to its own devices.

—Heffer, Simon

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English speaking audiences.

—Wharton, Edith Newbold ne¤  e Jones

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

—Dryden,John

Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry box.

—James, Henry

My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language.

—Gibbon, Edward

Many continentals think life is a game, the English think cricket is a game.

—Mikes, George

Here tulips bloom as theyare told; Unkempt about those hedges blows An English unofficial rose.

—Brooke, Rupert Chawner

I remember on one occasion, when she was asked to sing the English version of the touching melody 'The Red-Haired Man's Wife', shereplied,'Iwill sing it for you; but the English words and the air are like a quarrelling man and wife; the Irish melts into the tune, but the English doesn't.'

—Carleton,William

WatchingTallulah Bankhead on the stage islike watching somebody skating on very thin iceöand the English want to be there when she falls through.

—Campbell, Mrs Patrick ne¤  e Beatrice Rose StellaTanner

I haven't been abroad in so long that I almost speak English without an accent now.

—Benchley, Robert Charles

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

—Bradbury, Malcolm Stanley

They know on the Continent that European football without the English islike a hot dog without themustard.

—Charlton, Sir Bobby (Robert)

Philistinism!öWe have not the expression in English. Perhapswehavenottheword because wehavesomuch of the thing.

—Arnold, Matthew

[The translator] will find one English book and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book isthe Bible.

—Arnold, Matthew

I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.

—Crisp, Quentin

His English reminds me of tattered washing on the line†of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. 566

—Mencken, H(enry) L(ouis)

Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees, (If love remains) In an English lane.

—Browning, Robert

[The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.

—Jonson, Ben

'For God, for Country and for Yale', the outstanding single anti-climax in the English language.

—Thurber,James Grover

   A strange manner of battle, where one side works by constant motion and ceaseless charges, while the other can but endure passivelyas it standsfixed tothesod.The Norman arrow and sword worked on: in the English ranks the only movement was the dropping of the dead: the living stood motionless.

—William of Poitiers   11c.

Drink a health to the wonders of the western world, the pirates, preachers, poteen-makers, with the jobbing jockies; parching peelers, and the juries fill their stomachs selling judgments of the English law.

—Synge,John Millington

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

—Owen,Wilfred

It wasn't exactly carelessness; her knowledge of literate English contained such vast areas of desert that she took it for granted that half of what she wrote would be meaningless to her.

—Chandler, Raymond

It is as if Homer not only chronicled the siege of Troy, but conducted the siege as well. As if Shakespeare set his play writing aside to lead the English against the Armada.

—Cuomo, Mario Matthew

The more you look back into English history, the more you are forced to the conclusion that alongside civility and the deeply held convictions about individual rights, the English have a natural taste for disorder.

—Pavlova, Anna

Sonow they havemade our Englishtonguea gallimaufry or hodgepodge of all other speeches.

—Spenser, Edmund

Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firstöa dull man writing broken English, the secondöa broken man writing dull English.

—Nabokov,Vladimir

We have fed our sea for a thousand years And she calls us, still unfed, Though there's never a wave of all her waves But marks our English dead.

—Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard

For every word has its marrow in the English tongue for order and for delight. For the dissyllables such as able table &c are the fiddle rhymes. For all dissyllables and some trissyllables are fiddle rhymes. For the relations of words are in pairs first. For the relations of words are sometimes in oppositions. For the relations of words are according to their distances from the pair.

—Smart, Christopher

He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended.

—Murrow, Edward (Edgar) R(oscoe)

The Frenchhad a moremartial air thanthe English.There seemed to be a species of military instinct in all classes. No young man appeared to have finished his education till after a bloody campaign† They were at this singular period, without the least exaggeration, a century behind us in notions of legal and moral responsibility.

—Haydon, Benjamin Robert

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

—James, Henry

So in all humours sportively I range; My muse is rightly of the English strain, That cannot long one fashion entertain.

—Drayton, Michael

One of the last†of the great narrating English virgins.

—Updike,John Hoyer

Quamdiu centum viui remanserint, nuncquam Anglorum dominio aliquatenus volumus subjugari. As long as one hundred of us shall remain alive, we shall never consent to subject ourselves in any degree to English dominion.

—Anonymous

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

—Bagehot,Walter

Scots are Jocks,WelshmenTaffies, and Irishmen Paddies or Micks but†it is noticeable there is no similar designation for the English.

—Pavlova, Anna

'Fore heaven, I wonder at the desperate valour Of the bold English, that they dare let loose Their wives to all encounters!

—Jonson, Ben

There is a growing division in our comparatively prosperous society between the South and the North and Midlands, which are ailing, that cannot be allowed to continue. There is a general sense of tension. The old English way might be to quarrel and have battles, but they were friendly. I can only describe as wicked the hatred that has been introduced, and which is to be found among different types of people today. Not merelyan intellectual but a moral effort isrequired toget rid of it.

—Stockton

Yo no digo por eso que el te¤   no sea saludable†cuando duelen las tripas†pero al cabo no pasa de ser agua caliente; so¤  lo pod|¤a habernos venido de Inglaterra, que como all |¤ son herejes, ni tendra¤  n vino, ni bueyes cebones. I'm not saying that tea is not healthy†when you have a stomach ache†but, all in all, it is only hot water; it could only come from the English, who, being heretics as they are, probably have no wine or good beer.

—Gorostiza, Manuel Eduardo de

My aim all along has been (in Ezra Pound's term) the most drastic desuetization of Scottish life and letters, and, inparticular, thede-Tibetanizationofthe Highlands and Islands, and getting rid of the whole gang of high mucky-mucks, famous fatheads, old wives of both sexes, stuffed shirts, hollow men with headpieces stuffed with straw, bird-wits, lookers-under-beds, trained seals, creeping Jesuses, Scots Wha Ha'evers, village idiots, policemen, leaders of white-mouse factions and noted connoisseurs of bread and butter, glorified gangsters, and what 'Billy' Phelps calls Medlar Novelists (the medlar being a fruit that becomes rotten before it is ripe),Commercial Calvinists, makers of 'noises like a turnip', and all the touts and toadies and lickspittles o the English Ascendancy, and their infernal women-folk, and all their skunkoil skulduggery.

—Grieve

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.

—Nash, (Frederic) Ogden

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of vocabularyand syntax to mislead their weak minds.

—Sayers, Dorothy L(eigh)

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.

—Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam

Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what doyoualwaysfind? Thatthestables arethereal centre of the household.

—Shaw, George Bernard

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.

—Morley, Robert

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.

—Coupland, Douglas

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

—Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith)

Your Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman English.

—Defoe, Daniel

'Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry' is an aphorism which has saved manyan English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow.

—Mitford, Nancy Freeman

Nothing gives the Scots more pleasure than to hear the English abused.

—Pius II real name Enea Silvio de Piccolomini

He will give himseven feet of English ground, oras much more as he may be taller than other men.

—Harold II

'Curiouser and curiouser!'cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).

—Dodgson

I don't know, darlin', but I think it was somethin' he did against the English.

—Anonymous

All pro athletes are bilingual. They speak English and profanity.

—Howe, Gordie (Gordon)

   When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter.When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.

—Amis, Martin Louis

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, Read out my words at night, alone: I was a poet, I was young.

—Flecker,James Elroy

   But 'tis the talent of our English nation, Still to be plotting some new reformation.

—Dryden,John

If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilised.

—Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills

   Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the colour of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sundayafternoons in damp front farmhouse parlours, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.

—Thomas, Dylan Marlais

Here is one of the points about this planet which should be remembered; into every penetrable corner of it, and into most of the impenetrable corners, the English will penetrate.

—Macaulay, Dame (Emilie) Rose

You must understand,James, thattheir English God isnot so dominant a business institution as ours.

—Carr,J(ames) L(loyd)

Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language: it isthe condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it. On that definition Swift ismore Irishthan Goldsmith or Sheridan, although by the usual tests they are Irish and he is pure English.

—Cruise

L |' si vedra'   la superbia ch'asseta, che fa lo Scotto e l'Inghilese folle, s |' che non puo'   soffrir dentro a sua meta. There shall you see the pride which causes thirst, which makes the Scots and the English mad, so that they cannot remain within their boundaries.

—Dante Alighieri originally Durante

Watercolour is not especially difficult, but I must warn you to steer clear of those pretty English watercolourists, so skilful and alas so weak, and so often too truthful.

—Pissarro, Camille

   In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

—Brooke, Rupert Chawner

To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofaras we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.

—Fiedler, Leslie A(aron)

I read the first 2 pages of the usual sloppy English and [Stuart Gilbert] read me a lyrical bit about nudism in the wood and the end which is a piece of propaganda in favour of something which, outside of D. H. L.'s country at any rates, makes all the propaganda for itself.

—Joyce,James Augustine Aloysius

And Sir Richard said again: 'We be all good English men. Let us bang these dogs of Seville, the children of the devil, For I never turned my back upon Don or devil yet.'

—Tennyson

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

—Spenser, Edmund

Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thingöturn out your toes as you walköand remember who you are!

—Dodgson

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.

—Blake,William

The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.

—Butler, Samuel

Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent.

—Saki pseudonym of  Hector Hugh Munro