#England Quotes

“This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this EnglandThis nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,. . .This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land.”

“This England never did, nor never shall,Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,But when it first did help to wound itself.Now these her princes are come home again,Come the three corners of the world in arms,And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,If England to itself do rest but true.”

“More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them.”

“I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which lead to a dark gulf.”

“England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame and will get war.”

“The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars Englandhe should have said Britain, of coursealways wins one battlethe last.”

“It is in bad taste," is the most formidable word an Englishman can pronounce.”

“The English should give Ireland home rule - and reserve the motion picture rights.”

“The only link between Literature and the Drama left to us in England at the present moment is the bill of the play.”

“The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.”

“In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.”

“In England, if you commit a crime, the police don't have a gun and you don't have a gun. If you commit a crime, the police will say 'Stop, or I'll say stop again.'”

“A seashell should be the crest of England, not only because it represents a power built on the waves, but also the hard finish ofthe men. The Englishman is finished like a cowry or a murex.”

“In England ... education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and would probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.”

“Our civility, England determines the style of, inasmuch as England is the strongest of the family of existing nations, and as we are the expansion of that people. It is that of a trading nation; it is a shopkeeping civility. The English lord is a retired shopkeeper, and has the prejudices and timidities of that profession.”

“In England it is enough for a man to try and produce any serious, beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen.”

“Set in this stormy Northern sea, Queen of these restless fields of tide, England! what shall men say of thee, Before whose feet the worlds divide?”

“Ever since I first came here in 1963 to fight Henry Cooper, I have loved the people of England.”

“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.”

“This souls'prison we call England.”

“The Americans are the illegitimate children of the English.”

“Englishmen never will be slaves; they are free to do whatever the government and public opinion allow them.”

“Eternal is the fact that the human creature born in Ireland and brought up in its air is Irish. I have lived for twenty years in Ireland and for seventy-two in England; but the twenty came first and in Britain I am still a foreigner and shall die one.”

“Go anywhere in England where there are natural wholesome, contented and really nice English people; and what do you find? That the stables are the real centre of the household.”

“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.”

“The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.”

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

“The English are probably more capable than most peoples of making revolutionary change without bloodshed. In England, if anywhere,it would be possible to abolish poverty without destroying liberty.”

“Whenever an obviously well founded statement is made in England by a person specially well acquainted with the facts, that unlucky person is instantly and frantically contradicted by all the people who obviously know nothing about it.”

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

“It's a wonderful feeling to have a niece like youBecause you are always so dearYou are so dear no matter the yearBut all throughout each day of the yearThere could hardly be a town in the South of England where youcould throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.”

“What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?”

“England manufactures most of the world's airline food, as well as all the food you ever ate in your junior-high-school cafeteria.”

“England is a very popular foreign country to visit because the people there speak some English.”

“English history consists largely of royal people getting their heads chopped off...Needless to say, this brand of history was a hit with our son.”

“They have a lot of trouble with pronunciation, because they can't move their jaw muscles, because of malnutrition caused by wisely refusing to eat English food, much of which was designed and manufactured in medieval times during the reign of King Walter the Mildly Disturbed.”