Browsing Topic Best Englishmen Quotes

Sure, the English may very well hate me, but the Scottish love me, and that’s all that matters.

Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn’t there. If, however, you force him to look into it, he’ll at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.

that Englishman who came to challenge me three or four months ago, and whom I killed to stop him bothering me

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

Because I am an Englishman I spent most of my life in a state of embarrassment.

I am not an Englishman, I was never an Englishman, and I don’t ever want to be one. I am a Scotsman! I was a Scotsman and I will always be one.

The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen’s lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire.

Against the vast majority of my countrymen, even at this moment, in the name of humanity and civilization, I protest against our share in the destruction of Germany. A month ago Europe was a peaceful comity of nations; if an Englishman killed a German, he was hanged. Now, if an Englishman kills a German, or if a German kills an Englishman, he is a patriot, who has deserved well of his country.

I am going to have a cup of tea, like any good Englishman.

Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure

Americans and Englishmen, when they become acquainted with the Balkans, feel an astonished contempt when they study the mutual enmities of Bulgarians and Serbs, of Hungarians and Rumanians. It is evident to them that these enmities are absurd and that the belief of each little nation in its own superiority has no objective basis. But most of them are quite unable to see that the national pride of a Great Power is essentially as unjustifiable as that of a little Balkan country.

An Englishmen thinks seated; a Frenchmen standing; an American pacing, an Irishman, afterwards.

I’m an Englishman. What more can I say?

My two elder sisters married Englishmen and went abroad.

I sound like an Englishman impersonating an American impersonating an Englishman.

The last great Englishman is low.

I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since.

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

The reason why Englishmen are the best husbands in the world is because they want to be faithful. A Frenchman or an Italian will wake up in the morning and wonder what girl he will meet. An Englishman wakes up and wonders what the cricket score is.

We have a shotgun we inherited from my father-in-law, a paranoid Englishman living in Texas. I have a .22 Marlin rifle, similar to the one Annie Oakley had, and my husband has a .357 Magnum pistol. All those are locked up tight, of course. We have a couple of pellet guns that get more use than the real guns.

If I were going to war I would want to be alongside an Englishman not a Frenchman. The Frenchman would think too much.

Why do people speak of great men in terms of nationality? Great Germans, great Englishmen? Goethe always protested against being called a German poet. Great men are simply men and are not to be considered from the point of view of nationality, nor should the environment in which they were brought up be taken into account.

He was born an Englishman and remained one for years.

That part of the Englishman’s nature which has found gratification in religion is now drifting into political life.

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 freeTo foil and spoil the tyrantBeneath the greenwood tree.

It is the highest and most legitimate pride of an Englishman to have the letters M.P. written after his name. No selection from the alphabet, no doctorship, no fellowship, be it of ever so learned or royal a society, no knightship,–not though it be of the Garter,–confers so fair an honour.

The very phrase ‘foreign affairs’ makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.

A transplanted Irishman, German, Englishman is an American in one generation. A transplanted African is not one in five!

I know no place at which an Englishman may drop down suddenly among a pleasanter circle of acquaintance, or find himself with a more clever set of men, than he can do at Boston.

…but in every century, and ever since England has been what it is, an Englishman has always felt somewhat ashamed of his own emotion and of his own sympathy.

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

I’m French. I have not become an Englishman. I have the impression of living on an island called Arsenal. If you fancy a sightseeing tour of London, don’t ask me. You would get lost.

I think my favorite scenes [in Night Music] are the ones that kind of happen when the handsome Englishman shows up.. He doesn’t quite figure out she is from the 1920s because he doesn’t really figure out she is a ghost, because she has manifested into physical form.

Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely.

The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three [Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden and George Saintsbury], the greatest critic that ever lived – not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve.