Old Anglo Saxon Quotes & Sayings

So how would you define a Londoner, then?" Lady Penny asked curiously. "Someone who lives here. It's like the old definition of a cockney: someone who's born within hearing distance of Bow bells. And a foreigner," he added with a grin, "is anyone, Anglo-Saxon or not, who lives outside. — Edward Rutherfurd

I'm suspicious that what's behind the academic call for doing away with athletic scholarships is a nostalgia for the good old days, which leaves out everyone but white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, ... world's biggest cocktail party. — Scott MacDonald

Least hypothesis held no place of preference; Occam's razor could not slice the prime problem, the Nature of the Mind of God (might as well call it that to yourself, you old scoundrel; it's a short, simple, Anglo-Saxon monosyllable, not banned by having four letters - and as good a tag for what you don't understand as any). — Robert A. Heinlein

In terms of the outdoors, I and the others like me weren't badly cheated as such cheatings go nowadays, but we were cheated nevertheless. We learned quite a lot, but not enough. Instead of learning to move into country, as I think underneath we wanted, we learned mostly how to move onto it in the old crass Anglo-Saxon way, in search of edible or sometimes just mortal quarry. — John Graves

The three species of pine native to Wisconsin (white, red and jack) differ radically in their opinions about marriageable age. The precocious jackpine sometimes bloom and bears cones a year or two after leaving the nursery, and a few of my 13-year-old jacks already boast of grandchildren. My 13-year-old reds first bloomed this year, but my whites have not yet bloomed; they adhere closely to the Anglo-Saxon doctrine of free, white, and twenty-one. — Aldo Leopold

As a product of Anglo-Saxon-Protestant culture, I am familiar with its centuries-old tradition of hiding its abuse of women under pretty packaging. — Lundy Bancroft

When Winston Churchill wanted to rally the nation in 1940, it was to Anglo-Saxon that he turned: "We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." All these stirring words came from Old English as spoken in the year 1000, with the exception of the last one, surrender, a French import that came with the Normans in 1066
and when man set foot on the moon in 1969, the first human words spoken had similar echoes: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Each of Armstrong's famous words was part of Old English by the year 1000. — Robert Lacey

was fascinated by a 9th-century poem by the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf, whose religious poem Christ included the Old English word for the known inhabited world: middangeard, translated as "Middle-earth." The poem makes reference to a being called Earendal, who is the brightest of angels above Middle-earth and is sent to humans. — Wyatt North

There is scarcely any great author in European literature, old or new, who has not distinguished himself in his treatment of the supernatural. In English literature, I believe there is no exception from the time of the Anglo-Saxon poets to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to our own day. And this introduces us to the consideration of a general and remarkable fact, a fact that I do not remember to have seen in any books, but which is of very great philosophical importance: there is something ghostly in all great art, whether of literature, music, sculpture, or architecture. It touches something within us that relates to infinity — Lafcadio Hearn