Quotes about English

I always loved English because whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we think we are. English is much more a story of who we really are.

Americans might ponder two quotations. One is the much-cited, self-congratulatory saying attributed to Tocqueville (but whose source no one has so far been able to show me): "America is great because America is good." The other is the very real saying of Samuel Johnson, attacking the similar self-congratulatory "greatness" of the English: "We continue every day to show by new proofs, that no people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous.

It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

Here is the salient fact which distinguishes the English Revolution from all others: that those who wielded irresistible physical force were throughout convinced that it could give them no security. Nothing is more characteristic of the English people than their instinctive reverence even in rebellion for law and tradition. Deep in the nature of the men who had broken the King's power was the conviction that law in his name was the sole foundation on which they could build.

I'd been in college studying English creative writing and history when I made the decision to join the Marines in the runup to the Iraq war.

I am writing to Russell at the same time. I think we know, don't we, that the English, the Yankees, have this much in common with the Dutch, that their charity…is very Christian. Now, the rest of us not being very good Christians…That's what I can't put out of my head writing again like this.

I'm an eccentric English actor, and there's a lot of us around.

Today, for the first time in history, a Bishop of Rome sets foot on English soil. This fair land, once a distant outpost of the pagan world, has become, through the preaching of the Gospel, a beloved and gifted portion of Christ's vineyard.

training in the writing of good English is indispensable to any learned man who expects to make his learning count for what it ought to count in the effect on his fellow men.

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.

One knows so well the popular idea of health: the English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the unbeatable.