Quotes about English

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

The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I'll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

What a shocking set of crooks these English servants are! Not even murder will turn them from their feudal devotion to the man who pays!

Two wretched Moslems asserted "that the firing was done by the people of the English;" I asked one of them why he lied so, and he could utter no excuse: no other falsehood came to his aid as he stood abashed, before me, and so telling him not to tell palpable falsehoods, I left him gaping.

Englishmen learn Christ's law best in English. Moses heard God's law in his own tongue; so did Christ's apostles.

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

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.

The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination - not the small reach of their courage or latent power.

But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.

An English revolution is at least a solemn sacrifice: a French revolution is an indecent massacre.

In 1522, William Tyndale began translating the Greek New Testament into English. Tyndale had the audacity to actually translate the term ekklesia rather than superimpose the widely accepted German term kirche. Instead of church, he used the term congregation. If that wasn't offensive enough, the Greek text led him to use elder instead of priest and repent instead of do penance.

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.