The English Quotes

“An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.”
― George Mikes, How to Be an Alien: A Handbook for Beginners and Advanced Pupils

“He quite liked the English. They tended to say sorry a lot, which was quite understandable given their heritage and the crimes of their ancestors.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Earth

“Remember: If you go for a walk with a friend in England, don't say a single word for hours; if you go for a walk with your dog, talk to it all the time.”
― George Mikes, How to Be an Alien: A Handbook for Beginners and Advanced Pupils

“The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising themselves.”
― Wyndham Lewis

“The English have a proverb, 'Conscience makes cowboys of us all'.”
― Saki

“The English will never develop into a nation of philosophers. They will always prefer instinct to logic and character to intelligence. But they must get rid of their downright contempt for 'cleverness'. They cannot afford it any longer. They must grow less tolerant of ugliness, and mentally more adventurous. And they must stop despising foreigners. They are Europeans and ought to be aware of it.”
― George Orwell, The Lion and The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius

“The Englishman likes to imagine himself at sea, the German in a forest. It is impossible to express the difference of their national feeling more concisely.”
― Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

“At every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in heaven. A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in heaven. They are almost all English.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“...the English mode of existence in which everybody acts as if everybody else ( with few, or no exceptions ) was either an enemy or a bore.”
― john stuart mill

“Really, it was my fickleness, I sometimes think, that they found unendurable. If I had restricted myself to only one of their sweet girls, and married her, and chewed her neck in private, I suppose I might, like any eccentric cousin, have been made almost welcome among family and friends in the circle of the hearth. But perhaps I misjudge what degree of eccentricity even an Englishman can
tolerate.”
― Fred Saberhagen

“The difference between the English and the rest of mankind is that the English have long known the truth about themselves — which makes them always able to evade it discreetly, to slip round it.”
― Romain Gary

“Love is a word the English don't use except when they talk about their horses and dogs.”
― Clifford Thurlow, Cocaine Confidence

“There was a general tendency to ascribe almost any irregular or bad behaviour to the French. [...] A tonsil-tickling embrace is still known as a French kiss, as if somehow it would never have occurred to an English person to stick their tongue into another person's mouth if the French hadn't invented it.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“The trouble with the English was that they were English: damn cold fish! - Living underwater most of the year, in days the colour of night!”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Did you ask people to crime scenes on dates?”
― Maureen Johnson, The Name of the Star

“Sorry is what the English say when they don't know what to say.”
― Clifford Thurlow, Cocaine Confidence

“John, did Peter Owen (publisher) send you a copy of my book about books? If not I shall flay him. You were first on the list. But the English move slowly. They are all constipated, water-logged, worm-ridden, damn them!”
― Henry Miller, Proteus and the Magician: The Letters of Henry Miller and John Cowper Powys

“Thank you,’ I said, feeling shabby and English in the falling-apart, ill-looking way English people always seem whenever you stand them next to someone from a healthier latitude.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Bedlam Stacks

“The creed of the English is that there is no God and that it is wise to pray to him from time to time.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre

“Ah, you English - you do take your pleasures sadly.

- The Man from Montparnasse”
― James Stern, Penguin Parade: 1