England Quotes

The Englishman has all the qualities of a poker except its occasional warmth.

~ Daniel O'connell

The English never draw a line without blurring it.

~ Winston Churchill

Socialism has been preached for so long the British people no longer have any sense of personal responsibility.

~ Lord Thomson Of Fleet

Britain's best bulwarks are her wooden walls.

~ T. Augustine Arne

Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.

~ V. S. Pritchett

I think the British have the distinction above all other nations of being able to put new wine into old bottles without bursting them.

~ Clement Attlee

Whatever the rest of the world thinks of the English gentleman the English lady regards him apprehensively as something between God and a goat and equally formidable on both scores.

~ Margaret Halsey

Deploring change is the unchangeable habit of all Englishmen. If you find any important figures who really like change such as Bernard Shaw Keir Hardie Lloyd George Selfridge or Disraeli you will find that they are not really English at all but Irish Scotch Welsh American or Jewish. Englishmen make changes sometimes great changes. But secretly or openly they always deplore them.

~ Raymond Postgate

Where there is one Englishman there is a garden. Where there are two Englishmen there will be a club. But this does not mean any falling off in the number of gardens. There will be three. The club will have one too.

~ A. W. Smith

What should they know of England who only England know?

~ Rudyard Kipling

The Lord Chief Justice of England recently said that the greater part of his judicial time was spent investigating collisions between propelled vehicles each on its own side of the road each sounding its horn and each stationary.

~ Philip Guedalla

No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British which amazes Americans who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute.

~ Paul Gallico

The English have an extraordinary ability for flying into a great calm.

~ Alexander Woollcott

We are articulate but we are not particularly conversational. An Englishman won't talk for the sake of talking. He doesn't mind silence. But after the silence he sometimes says something.

~ Robert Morley

The nice sense of measure is certainly not one of Nature's gifts to her English children ... we have all of us yielded to infatuation at some moment of our lives.

~ Matthew Arnold

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It seems to me that you can go sauntering along for a certain period telling the English some interesting things about themselves and then all at once it feels as if you had stepped on the prongs of a rake.

~ Patrick Campbell

One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humour.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

The English may not like music but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

~ Thomas Beecham

That typically English characteristic for which there is no English name -esprit de corps.

~ Frank Adcock

The British are just as keen to make money as the Americans but they prefer hypocrisy to a blatantly commercial attitude.

~ Wendy Michener

Nothing unites the English like war. Nothing divides them like Picasso.

~ Hugh Mills

The British love permanence more than they love beauty.

~ Hugh Casson

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

~ George Bernard Shaw

The British are terribly lazy about fighting. They like to get it over and done with and then set up a game of cricket.

~ Stephen Leacock

A Scotch mist may wet an Englishman to the skin.

~ English Proverb

But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from its taps, it is said, has passed six times through the kidneys of another, and every scrap of its land has been trodden on, fought over, dug up and broken down for centuries.

~ Amanda Craig

Far too many people—many of them academics, many politicians—continue to jabber about a supposed 'special relationship' between our two coun

~ Peter Hitchens

[T]he hyphenation question is, and always has been and will be, different for English immigrants. One can be an Italian-American, a Greek-American, an Irish-American and so forth. (Jews for some reason prefer the words the other way around, as in 'American Jewish Congress' or 'American Jewish Committee.') And any of those groups can and does have a 'national day' parade on Fifth Avenue in New York. But there is no such thing as an 'English-American' let alone a 'British-American,' and one can only boggle at the idea of what, if we did exist, our national day parade on Fifth Avenue might look like. One can, though, be an Englishman in America. There is a culture, even a literature, possibly a language, and certainly a diplomatic and military relationship, that can accurately be termed 'Anglo-American.' But something in the very landscape and mapping of America, with seven eastern seaboard states named for English monarchs or aristocrats and countless hamlets and cities replicated from counties and shires across the Atlantic, that makes hyphenation redundant. Hyphenation—if one may be blunt—is for latecomers.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Eight years in the Wolston academy and I knew it all came down to the next 90 minutes.

~ P.j. Davitt

I loved the first Christmas I had in England.

~ Blythe Danner

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

~ George Orwell

Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England.

~ Stephen Gardiner

Before there was any chance to go to England, I changed schools, and it was rugby from there on in.

~ Brian O'driscoll

There tends to be a jealousy in England towards countries that are successful.

~ Chris O'dowd

In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.

~ Cynthia Ozick