160 quotes found
“The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.”
“In the end it may well be that Britain will be more honoured by the historians for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it.”
“Oh it's a snug little island! A right little tight little island!”
“I regard England as my wife and America as my mistress.”
“The Englishman respects your opinions but he never thinks of your feelings.”
“The Englishman has all the qualities of a poker except its occasional warmth.”
“The English never draw a line without blurring it.”
“Socialism has been preached for so long the British people no longer have any sense of personal responsibility.”
“Britain's best bulwarks are her wooden walls.”
“Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.”
“I think the British have the distinction above all other nations of being able to put new wine into old bottles without bursting them.”
“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.”
“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 w...”
“Far too many peoplemany of them academics, many politicianscontinue to jabber about a supposed 'special relationship' between our two coun”
“Eight years in the Wolston academy and I knew it all came down to the next 90 minutes.”
“[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 re...”
“First of all, you must never speak of anything by its name -- in that country. So, if you see a tree on a mountain, it will be better to say 'Look at the green on the high'; for that's how they tal...”
“W. H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you ...”
“When just a kid, moved back to Canada and looking for a taste of England, I’d picked up a book of my Gram’s, a dog-eared romance from the ’sixties about English hospital ‘sisters’ trying to get it ...”
“I once had every hope,’ he says. ‘The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a l...”
