Quotes About English

Today there are about six thousand languages in the world, and half of the world's population speaks only ten of them. English is the single most dominant of these ten.

At the time that the sagas were written, however, names were not passed down in families, and recall that English surnames only came into being seven hundred years ago.

Ronald Reagan used to say that the nine scariest words in the English language were 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.

The true mark of English conversation is not being able to tell when you've been insulted. I think the more sophisticated society becomes, the more it hides behind the masks it manufactures.

Particularly significant for the future development of Guderian's military thought were the linguistic abilities he began to acquire at school. He developed excellent French and good English.

According to Dr Bouget, a nutritionist at the Bichat Hospital in Paris, the difference in diets between French and English women goes back tot he industrial revolution. 'The English working in the factories quickly lost touch with fundamentals such as fruit, and vegetables that are so central to the French diet even today,' he says. 'England changed its habits very quickly and became a fast-food nation, eating chips and drinking too much alcohol.

I fail to see why you did not understand that groceryman, he did not call it "ground ground nuts," he called it "ground ground-nuts" which is the only really SENSible thing to call it. Peanuts grow in the GROUND and are therefore GROUND-nuts, and after you take them out of the ground you grind them up and you have ground ground-nuts, which is a much more accurate name than peanut butter, you just don't understand English.

All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home; it wants to be read by the fire in a gentleman's leather easy chair--not on a secondhand studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brownstone front.

i go through life watching the english language being raped before me face. like miniver cheevy, i was born too late.

As an English production it does not rank high. It might get by at Princeton but certainly not at Harvard.

In other words, at the time of Johnson's death in 1784, and thirty years after its first publication, there were about 6,000 copies of the complete English editions of the Dictionary in circulation, in addition to a few hundred copies

For another 300 years lawyers would continue to do a great deal of their writing and thinking in French, and they would supplement it with generous helpings of Latin – words like affidavit and subpoena – which conveyed an air of precision and authority unavailable to English. To this day the language of the law proves prolix, repetitious, archaic and theatrical, as indeed do many of its quite mystifying processes and practitioners.

My readiness to admit to my fallibility is perhaps rather English, but I hope that the problems I describe will be familiar to doctors and patients everywhere.

the chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of the Indian peoples by the English lies in this very absence of a religious consciousness and of the guidance for conduct which should flow from it

If the English have enslaved the people of India it is just because the latter recognized, and still recognize, force as the fundamental principle of the social order. In accord with that principle they submitted to their little rajahs, and on their behalf struggled against one another, fought the Europeans, the English, and are now trying to fight with them again.

London has changed enormously and so have the English in the past decade. They're more like Americans and more like Europeans, too. They're always eating out, and when they're at home they don't cook the way they did ten years ago. They're all sitting around in cafés, like the Continentals, drinking coffee and chattering and watching the world go by.

Like all weddings it had left the strange feeling of futility, the slight sense of depression that comes to English people who have tried, from their strong sense of tradition, to be festive and sentimental and in high spirits too early in the day. The frame of mind supposed to be appropriate to an afternoon wedding can only be genuinely experienced by an Englishman at two o'clock in the morning.

"Equestrian," by the by, is the gayest word in the English language. In fact, I thought Brokeback Mountain should have been called "Two Equestrians."

I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days.

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.

We must insist on assimilation - immigration without assimilation is an invasion. We need to tell folks who want to come here, they need to come here legally. They need to learn English, adopt our values, roll up their sleeves and get to work.

there are current linguistic reverberations—especially the impending disappearance of most of the modern world's 6,000 surviving languages, becoming replaced by English, Chinese, Russian, and a few other languages whose numbers of speakers have increased enormously in recent centuries.

All Villains were English, and descendants of the upper classes who had been pushed to the edges of the Albion Peninsula after the devastating Class Wars of the nineteenth century.

Some people have asked me where I find the large quantity of prepositions that I need to keep my Bookworms fit and well. The answer is, of course, that I use omitted prepositions, of which, when mixed with dropped definite articles, make a nourishing food. There are a superabundance of these in the English language