Englishmen Quotes & Sayings

Not only England, but every Englishman is an island. — Novalis

You are Englishmen; mind your privileges, give not away your right. — William Penn

An Englishman is content to say nothing when he has nothing to say. — Samuel Johnson

In my time first cousins did not meet like strangers. But we are learning modesty from the Americans, and old English ways are too gross for us. — J. Sheridan Le Fanu

My two elder sisters married Englishmen and went abroad. — Bill Forsyth

In truth, no men on earth can cheer like Englishmen, who do so rally one another's blood and spirit when they cheer in earnest, that the stir is like the rush of their whole history, with all its standards waving at once, from Saxon Alfred's downwards. — Charles Dickens

The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen's lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire. — Winston Churchill

Thousands of Americans, Englishmen and Frenchmen have visited Germany during the months after the national revolution and were able to testify as eye-witnesses that there is no country in the world where law and order are better maintained than in present-day Germany. That there is no country in the world where person and property are held in better respect than in our own, but that there is perhaps also no country in the word where a more rigorous fight is put up against those who believe that they are free to let loose their lower instincts to the detriment of their fellow-beings. — Adolf Hitler

No Englishman is ever fairly beaten — George Bernard Shaw

In dealing with Englishmen you can be sure of one thing only, that the logical solution will not be adopted. — William Ralph Inge

German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. — George Bernard Shaw

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles and cuts off his king's head on republican principles. — George Bernard Shaw

Leave three Englishmen in a room and they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them. — Julian Fellowes

within the harbour, or on the beautiful sea without. The line of demarcation between the two colours, black and blue, showed the point which the pure sea would not pass; but it lay as quiet as the abominable pool, with which it never mixed. Boats without awnings were too hot to touch; ships blistered at their moorings; the stones of the quays had not cooled, night or day, for months. Hindoos, Russians, Chinese, Spaniards, Portuguese, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Genoese, Neapolitans, Venetians, Greeks, Turks, descendants from all the builders of Babel, come to trade at Marseilles, sought the shade alike - taking refuge in any hiding-place from a sea too intensely blue to be looked at, and a sky of purple, set with one great flaming jewel of fire. The universal stare made the eyes ache. Towards the distant line of Italian coast, indeed, it was a little relieved — Charles Dickens

An Englishmen thinks seated; a Frenchmen standing; an American pacing, an Irishman, afterwards. — Austin O'Malley

By 1929, one out of every five Americans had a car (as opposed to one out of thirty-seven Englishmen, one out of forty Frenchmen, and one out of forty-eight Germans). — Maureen Corrigan

This war proceeds along its terrible path by the slaughter of infantry ... I say to myself every day. What is going on while we sit here, while we go away to dinner or home to bed? Nearly, 1000 - Englishmen, Britishers, and the other is America ... Everything else is swept away. — Winston Churchill

There is no land like England,
Where'er the light of day be;
There are no hearts like English hearts,
Such hearts of oak as they be;
There is no land like England,
Where'er the light of day be:
There are no men like Englishmen,
So tall and bold as they be!
And these will strike for England,
And man and maid be free
To foil and spoil the tyrant
Beneath the greenwood tree. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

But I was no philosopher, and the sun was beginning to let me know that it was the hour when only mad dogs and Englishmen exposed themselves to its rays. — Anne Fortier

IT IS A MISTAKE to suppose that all men, or at least all Englishmen, want to be free. On the contrary, if freedom entails responsibility, many of them want none of it. They would happily exchange their liberty for a modest (if illusory) security. — Theodore Dalrymple

Abortion ... was probably regarded by the average Roman of the later days of Paganism much as Englishmen in the last century regarded convivial excesses, as certainly wrong, but so venial as scarcely to deserve censure. — William Edward Hartpole Lecky

We are showing that Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit, fighting it out to the end. — Robert Falcon Scott

Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America? — E.B. White

It was asserted that these escapes were organised by a band of Englishmen, whose daring seemed to be unparalleled, and who, from sheer desire to meddle in what did not concern them, spent their spare time in snatching away lawful victims destined for Madame la Guillotine. — Emmuska Orczy

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

What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for. — Joseph Heller

Formal education in British India was remarkable for its lack of connection with its Indian environment. Like the African persuaded to cover his nakedness with a Mother Hubbard, we wore mental Mother Hubbards, and they were often a sad fit. Our textbooks had been compiled by Englishmen for English children, of whom there were none in my school and few in any school in India. — Nayantara Sahgal

He doesn't want to face Englishmen,' the Lord of Douglas said, and he knew he was right. Ever since the Scottish knights — Bernard Cornwell

American gentlemen are a cross between English and French men, and yet really altogether like neither. They are more refined and modest than Frenchmen, and less manly, shy, and rough, than Englishmen. Their brains are finer and flimsier, their bodies less robust and vigorous than ours. We are the finer animals, and they the subtler spirits. Their intellectual tendency is to excitement and insanity, and ours to stagnation and stupidity. — Fanny Kemble

It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm. — Samuel Johnson

Englishmen do like to get in a dress, any excuse. — Noel Fielding

Englishmen Francis Galton to describe the "science" of bettering human stock and the elimination of unwanted characteristics ... and individuals. Galton proposed societal intervention for the furtherance of "racial quality," maintaining that "Jews are specialized for a parasitical existence upon other nations" and that "except by sterilization I cannot yet see any way of checking the produce of the unfit who are allowed their liberty and are below the reach of moral control. — Francis Galton

Englishmen are said to love their laws; - that is the reason, I suppose, they give us so many of them, and in different editions. — Anna Letitia Barbauld

I am a collector of notes upon subjects that have diversity - such as deviations from concentricity in the lunar crater Copernicus, and a sudden appearance of purple Englishmen - stationary meteor-radiants, and a reported growth of hair on the bald head of a mummy - and 'Did the girl swallow the octopus? — Charles Fort

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

Old England is our home, and Englishmen are we; Our tongue is known in every clime, our flag in every sea. — Mary Howitt

Window-breaking, when Englishmen do it, is regarded as honest expression of political opinion. Window-breaking, when Englishwomen do it, is treated as a crime. — Emmeline Pankhurst

Human beings are better equipped to cope with disaster and hardship than they are with unvarying security, but as long as security is the highest value in a community they can have little opportunity to decide this for themselves. It is agreed that Englishmen coped magnificently with a war, and were more cheerful, enterprising and friendly under the daily threat of bombardment than they are now under benevolent peacetime, when we are so far from worrying about how many people starve in Africa that we can tolerate British policy in Nigeria. — Germaine Greer

The last great Englishman is low. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

Continue, my dear friend. It is interesting for me to see this new Bond. Englishmen are so odd. They are like a nest of Chinese boxes. It takes a very long time to get to the centre of them. When one gets there the result is unrewarding, but the process is instructive and entertaining. Continue. Develop your arguments. There may be something I can use to my own chief the next time I want to get out of an unpleasant job.' He grinned maliciously. Bond ignored him. — Ian Fleming

People were intrinsically selfish, and many hated the idea of a woman in charge of the Institute. They would not put themselves at risk for her. Only a few weeks ago he would have said the same thing about himself. Now, knowing Charlotte, he realized to his surprise, the idea of risking himself for her seemed an honor, as it would be to most Englishmen to risk themselves for the queen. — Cassandra Clare

It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever. — H.P. Lovecraft

You know," said Jack, "I was a King for a while in Hindoostan, and my subjects would get worked up into a lather about a potato, which to them was worth as much as a treasure-chest. At first I'd want to know everything about the potato in question, and I would take a large stake in the matter, but towards the end of my reign - "
Here Jack rolled his eyes, as Frenchmen frequently did during encounters with Englishmen. Leroy seemed to take his meaning very clearly. "It is the same with every King. — Neal Stephenson

We are Englishmen; that is one good fact. — Oliver Cromwell

New Englanders began the Revolution not to institute reforms and changes in the order of things, but to save the institutions and customs that already had become old and venerable with them; and were new only to a few stupid Englishmen a hundred and fifty years behind the times. — Edward Pearson Pressey

In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew. Is your God an Englishman or an American? — Maurice Samuel

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought. — William Butler Yeats

Yes, thank God. With a little subterfuge I managed to smuggle him back under my roof where he belongs. He is resting comfortably right now, and I am on cloud ten because cloud nine was full of pompous Englishmen. Wasn't my scene. — Tiffany Reisz

Malcolm Muggeridge who said that the only real Englishmen left in the world were to be found in India. — Ruskin Bond

He belonged to that inarticulate order of young Englishmen who dislike any form of emotion, and who find it peculiarly hard to explain their mental processes in words. — Agatha Christie

I don't hold it against you that you turned out Irish, either. I wasn't there to make Englishmen of you, and so it's Irish you are, by default. — Neal Stephenson

Yes, there's sense in that. But the suddenly rich are on a level with any of us nowadays. Money buys position at once. I don't say that it isn't all right. The world generally knows what it's about, and knows how to drive a bargain. I dare say that it makes the new rich pay too much. But there's no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age. It's the thing that chiefly strikes the imagination. The Englishmen who come here are more curious about the great new millionaires than about anyone else, and they respect them more. It's all very well. I don't complain of it. — William Dean Howells

English Passengers, a first novel by Matthew Kneale, relates what follows when a group of Englishmen arrive in mid-nineteenth-century Tasmania with different purposes: to find the Garden of Eden, to prove the natives are less intelligent than the British, and to escape from British law. Kneale also describes the tragic life of a young Aboriginal whose experiences are shaped by the arrival of the British. — Nancy Pearl

Tennis was a game invented by a woman named Samantha Tennis in 1839, in the village of Lobsworth, County of Kent, as a diversion for the wealthy and titled Englishmen of the region, who had nothing better to do at the time but drink, belch and wear funny clothes. — Dan Jenkins

You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer," said Miss Pross, in her breathing. "Nevertheless, you shall not get the better of me. I am an Englishwoman. — Charles Dickens

Since the French Revolution Englishmen are all intermeasurable one by another, certainly a happy state of agreement to which I forone do not agree. — William Blake

I am the last Englishman to rule in India. — Jawaharlal Nehru

Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey. Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method. So they allowed it to begin ... — Edward Thomas

think that the rare Englishmen who have this gesture are never of the heavy type - for fear of any lumbering instance to the contrary, I will say, hardly ever; they have usually a fine temperament and much tolerance towards the smaller errors of men (themselves inclusive). The — George Eliot

I was a terrible dancer. I dance like an Englishman. — John Cleese

We Indians are one as no two Englishmen are. — Mahatma Gandhi

I had always thought myself to be a man of moderate passions indistinguishable in that respect from most Englishmen born to our logical and mannered times. — K.W. Jeter

I want the marginality to come into the center. This is the thing I was conscious of growing up, when I later lived in England. I saw all these war movies that came out shortly after the war, and they were all about the war being fought by Englishmen or Americans, there were no other "allies" in it - from India or Australia, etc. — Michael Ondaatje

John Locke invented common sense, and only Englishmen have had it ever since! — Bertrand Russell

Ask any man what nationality he would prefer to be, and ninety nine out of a hundred will tell you that they would prefer to be Englishmen — Cecil Rhodes

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent,
others merely sensible, as the phrase is,
others prophetic. — Henry David Thoreau

For a long moment, while Brock stood off observing them, Ned and Barley appraised one another as only Englishmen can who are of the same height and class and shape of head. — John Le Carre

Why, I've seen Kentuckians who hated whiskey, Virginians who weren't descended from Pocahontas, Indianians who hadn't written a novel, Mexicans who didn't wear velvet trousers with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen, spendthrift Yankees, cold-blooded Southerners, narrow- minded Westerners, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on the street to watch a one-armed grocer's clerk do up cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man and don't handicap him with the label of any section. — O. Henry

How come the Chinese can go where I can't go in America? Englishmen can come and set up a business in white America and do things I can't do.The Puerto Rican, Hawaiians, just about everybody can do more than black people and are more respected. — Muhammad Ali

Good ale, the true and proper drink of Englishmen. He is not deserving of the name of Englishman who speaketh against ale, that is good ale. — George Henry Borrow

Sometimes, however, the Gaelic blood asserts itself. The Frenchmen will then attack. But the French attacking spirit is like bottled lemonade. It lacks tenacity. The Englishmen, on the other hand, one notices that they are of Germanic blood. Sportsmen easily take to flying, and Englishmen see in flying nothing but a sport. — Manfred Von Richthofen

Damn it all, it's the first duty of a soldier - it's the first duty of all Englishmen - to be able to tell a good lie in answer to a charge. — Ford Madox Ford

He cursed himself for having assumed the weather would be sunny. Perhaps it was the result of evolution, he thought
some adaptive gene that allowed the English to go on making blithe outdoor plans in the face of almost certain rain. — Helen Simonson

Some persons have ventured to say that it is only since Englishmen ceased to believe in the Bible that they began to discover how beautiful it was. — Lafcadio Hearn

The Almighty in His infinite wisdom did not see fit to create Frenchmen in the image of Englishmen. — Winston Churchill

An Englishman fears contempt more than death. — Oliver Goldsmith

Englishmen have always loved Moliere. — Lytton Strachey

That Englishman who came to challenge me three or four months ago, and whom I killed to stop him bothering me — Alexandre Dumas

And that continued for quite a while until the adventurer admitted that it IS an accepted fact among monsters and giants of all stripes that Englishmen are delicious. — Christopher Moore

You see, Francisco, a warrior isn't just someone who slays dragons - or Englishmen, like Mel Gibson does in our favorite movie, Braveheart. A warrior can also be a man who takes apart an engine to make soup and then serves it to his brothers, keeping up their spirits with the rising inflections of his voice. — Hector Tobar

Eyes are bold as lions,
roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They speak all languages. They wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age or rank; they respect neither property nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and through you in a moment of time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into another through them! — Ralph Waldo Emerson

And Englishmen like posing as gods. — E. M. Forster

For us, sons of France, political sentiment is a passion; while, for the Englishmen, politics are a question of business. — Wilfrid Laurier

It was during the eighteenth century - a period of boastful satisfaction with the nice balances within the English constitution - that Englishmen came to accept the Whig view of the utility of an armed citizenry. The armed citizen was not only affirmed to be protecting himself but, together with his fellows, provided the ultimate check on tyranny. — Joyce Lee Malcolm

I should add that there are undoubtedly charming Englishmen; I have often met them. But they are rarely our fellow-guests at hotels. — Guy De Maupassant

Englishmen have a genius for looking uncomfortable. Their feelings are terribly mixed up with their personal appearance. — Sara Jeannette Duncan

If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia? — Pat Buchanan

These are Scottish lassies. They'll have been brought up to believe that Englishmen have long tails and cloven hooves."
"I'll be happy to prove there's no tail on this Sassenach," John said, grinning.
"Ah, but if they see you without breeches they'll know the other wee rumor about Sassenach men is true. They'd certain not have you then. — Lecia Cornwall

God is decreeing to begin some newand great period in his Church, even to the reforming of Reformation itself. What does he then but reveal Himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first to his Englishmen? — John Milton

But Lord! To see the absurd nature of Englishmen that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange. — Samuel Pepys

When you play test cricket, you don't give the Englishmen an inch. Play it tough, all the way. Grind them into the dust. — Donald Bradman

I have to laugh when the English claim they are such a wonderful nation. Everyone knows that Englishmen are really Germans, that the English kings were German, and that in Russia the emperors were either of German origin or received their education in Germany. — Hermann Goring

Englishmen must have an island. — F Scott Fitzgerald

We used to do sock puppet shows for my auntie back in the day. Me and my friends would do accents of Englishmen, and we would sip tea and act like we were rich in front of the family, and they thought it was just hilarious, the level of perception that we had about things that we'd never experienced. — Keith Stanfield

You Englishmen,' said Herr Wurter. 'You are all the same. Wherever you are you behave as if you were at home and your word was law. — Derek Raymond

I'm an Englishman. What more can I say? — Alan Sugar

The scientific study of the vital relationship between infants and their mothers was started by upper-class Englishmen who were torn from their families as young boys to be sent off to boarding schools, where they were raised in regimented same-sex settings. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Englishmen learn Christ's law best in English. Moses heard God's law in his own tongue; so did Christ's apostles. — John Wycliffe

All of us have read of what occured during that interval. The tale is in every Englishman's mouth; and you and I, who were children when the great battle was won and lost, are never tired of hearing and recounting the history of that famous action. Its rememberance rankles still in the bosoms of millions of the countrymen of those brave men who lost the day. They pant for an opportunity of revenging that humiliation; and if a contest, ending in a victory on their part, should ensue, elating them in their turn, and leaving its cursed legacy of hatred and rage behind to us, there is no end to the so-called glory and shame, and to the alterations of successful and unsuccessful murder, in which two high-spirited nations might engage. Centuries hence, we Frenchmen and Englishmen might be boasting and killing each other still, carrying out bravely the Devil's code of honor. — William Makepeace Thackeray

They were Englishmen and, to them, the decline of other nations was the most natural thing in the world. They belonged to a race blessed with so sensitive an appreciation of its own talents (and so doubtful an opinion of anybody else's) that they would not have been at all surprised to learn that the Venetians themselves had been entirely ignorant of the merits of their own city - until Englishmen had come to tell them it was delightful. — Susanna Clarke