English Quotes - page 9

New York doesn't exactly have neighborhoods, the way most cities do. What it has is closer to distinct and separate villages, some of them existing on different continents, some of them existing in different centuries, and many of them at war with one another. English is not the primary language in many of these villages, but the Roman alphabet does still have a slight edge. (Donald E. Westlake)
No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English. View quote
Robertson Davies
The War of the Roses in England and the Civil War in America were both intestinal conflicts arising out of similar ideas. In the first the clash was between feudalism and the new economic order; in the second, between an agricultural society and a new industrial one. Both led to similar ends; the first to the founding of the English nation, and the second to the founding of the American. Both were strangely interlinked; for it was men of the old military and not of the new economic mind - men, such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh - who founded the English colonies in America. View quote
J. F. C. Fuller
What initially attracted me to The Seventh Seal was that it had values and characteristics which I was familiar with in other art forms, most notably, the European novel and certain forms on English drama, and indeed, in relation to my rather academic interest in history -- not "history" in the normal sense, but history as a form of entertainment. It might be a very unfashionable view but I believe that history is an amazing bank or reserve area of plots, characterisations, extraordinary events, etc. View quote
Peter Greenaway
In fact, it is amazing how much European films - Italian, French, German and English - have recovered a certain territory of the audience in their countries over the last few years. View quote
Wim Wenders
Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used. View quote
Russell Baker
In the days of Ram Mohan Roy when English education was introduced in this country, the Mahomedans did not accept it... They did not accept English education and at the same time they were divorced from the culture which their fathers had advanced. The result was that whereas the Hindus got on in life, got into government employment, got many things which people value in life, the Mahomedans were left without it and gradually there came to be a sort of estrangement between the two nationalities at the time of the Swadeshi movement. View quote
Chittaranjan Das
Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers. View quote
Anton Chekhov
The bright old day now dawns again the cry runs through the land, in England there shall be dear bread in Ireland, sword and brand and poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand, so rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand, of the fine old English Tory days hail to the coming time. View quote
Charles Dickens
I don't hold it against the men who beat me because undoubtedly there are some ruffians of every nationality and the English are not exceptions. View quote
Oswald Pohl
In my opinion, a war between England and Germany was a war between brothers. In my inner self I admired the English government and political system. (Walter Schellenberg)
All the rest of the world uses the word electricity. They've borrowed the word from English. But we Chinese have our own word for it! View quote
Mao Zedong
Moreover, there is this completely false trial. I would participate wholeheartedly in a trial if it were to determine the guilt for 5 million murdered people and the guilt for the atrocities. But I see in this trial endless other things brought out and I have the feeling that in the shadow of the guilt of these murders the German people shall be considered guilty of everything, and in the shadow of this guilt the Americans, English, French, and especially the Russians will want to get rid of their own dirty linen. View quote
Hans Fritzsche
Even though there's a massive amount of people of colour now living in Scotland...this country is 30 or 40 years behind any other English city in terms of racial attitudes and integration. There's no proper acknowledgement of the slave trade and how many Scottish cities were founded on money from that. Our children are just not taught that history. View quote
Jackie Kay
I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul. View quote
James Joyce
Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more Or close the wall up with our English dead. View quote
William Shakespeare
The English seem to think drinking wine is like committing adultery, something you do rarely and abroad. View quote
William Nicholson
A gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. View quote
Mark Twain
The school was nothing but reminiscence - of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past. View quote
Edmund White
Well, I am from India and I wanted to make films in English for the international market in India. So that was really the main thing, and then of course economically it was cheaper to make films in India. View quote
Ismail Merchant
Human rights did not begin with the French Revolution... [they] really stem from a mixture of Judaism and Christianity... [we English] had 1688, our quiet revolution, where Parliament exerted its will over the King... it was not the sort of Revolution that France's was...'Liberty, equality, fraternity' – they forgot obligations and duties I think. And then of course the fraternity went missing for a long time. (Margaret Thatcher)
I remember reports that the American and English newspapers were very happy about the fact that so many were killed in Dresden. There are many instances of barbarity and cruelty on the part of the Allies which I could tell you. View quote
Julius Streicher
[Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; ... Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, ... as have also long since our best English tragedies, as... trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory. View quote
John Milton
I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death. View quote
John Keats
The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought. View quote
Bernard Bailyn