Top 1200 Plain English Quotes & Sayings

My father was English. He date-raped my mother so she's hated English men ever since. You know my boyfriend's English, and I'm, uh, I'm half-English, which she's never been real happy about. If she finds out I'm dating someone English, she'll ah, think I' turning my back on her and becoming a foreigner.' Cathy, that's the stupidest reason I've ever heard.

Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.

English is no problem for me because I am actually English. My whole family are English; I was brought up listening to various forms of the English accent.

I'm English, without a doubt. I will never ever say I'm not English. English born and bred. I'm Turkish, though

Not long time ago there was a striking example of the extent to which English has diverged: a television company put out a programme filmed in the English city of Newcastle, where the local variety of English is famously divergent and difficult, and the televised version was accompanied by English subtitles!

The English, the plain English, of the politest address of a gentleman to a lady is, I am now, dear Madam, your humble servant: Pray be so good as to let me be your Lord and Master.

Communists, socialists and fascists everywhere, from Mr. Obama upward, have taken to the global warming cause like a quack to colored water. Just about every word they utter on this subject is a falsehood calculated to deceive, or - in plain English - a lie.

My English is closer to the literary English, and I'm not very familiar with jokes in English or with, you know, with small talk in English.

It's fantastic for Arsenal, and for English football as well. You've got an English club with a lot of young English talent committing themselves to a club.

Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.

I think English is very important for tennis players. To be on the tour, it's much more easier if you speak English. So that's why I knew that I have to improve my English.

A lot of the demos I write are all in English, so releasing music in English isn't translating to English, it's just keeping them in English.

I didn't know shorthand either. This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand would be something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.

You can be plain and smart, or pretty and smart. You can even be plain and dumb! You just have to be yourself.

I felt like, I need to do English music; I speak better English than I do Korean. I think the fans enjoy it as well, so let's start making music in English.

My childhood was idyllic to begin with. We lived on a farm in Oxfordshire and my mum used its produce in the kitchen. She made plain, English-style food, cooked exceptionally - it's what I've based my career on.

While he has not, in my hearing, spoken the English language, he makes it perfectly plain that he understands it. And he uses his ears, tail, eyebrows, various rumbles and grunts, the slant of his great cold nose or a succession of heartrending sighs to get his meaning across.

You are not so good a Christian when you are neglecting a plain duty as when you are performing it. And joining the church is a plain duty for all who mean to be Christians.

It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.

This book is intended for use in English courses in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature. It aims to give in a brief space the principal requirements of plain English style. It aims to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention (in Chapters II and III) on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated. The numbers of the sections may be used as references in correcting manuscript.

In the 19th century, the English were loathed. Every memoir that you read of that period, indicates the loathing that everybody felt for the English, the only difference between the English and Americans, in this respect, is the English rather liked being loathed and the Americans apparently dislike it intensely.

I'm trying to talk to my kids in Japanese, because I'm not a pro English speaker. My wife speaks to them in English. That's her first language. I don't want my kids to feel the same as me when I was studying English. It was so frustrating.

Yes, that man acted ugly," she told us in plain English. "But throwing more ugliness back at him ain't the answer.

It is no exaggeration to describe plain English as a fundamental tool of government.

The terrorists haven't won, and we should tell them in plain English, 'No, there will never be a mosque at Ground Zero.'

A passage is not plain English - still less is it good English - if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.

English is not the primary language for universities in China, Korea, and Japan, but they are being evaluated on the basis of publications in English and courses taught in English.

In many ways, I've chosen to be plain, almost too plain, too self-effacing. Like, if I record a vocal and I don't like the way it sounds, I would have them turn it up and take the reverb off it to make it as plain as possible.

I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose.

Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner, because English is the language that's spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication.

The English, the English, The English are best: So Up with the English and Down with the Rest!

To make yourself understood you have to think plain and write plain.

My English was limited to vacationing and not really engaging with Americans. I knew 'shopping' and 'eating' English - I could say 'blue sweater,' 'creme brulee,' and 'Caesar salad,' - so I came here thinking I spoke English.

Men of Science would do well to talk plain English. The most abstruse questions can very well be discussed in our own tongue ... I make a particular appeal to the botanists, who appear to delight in troublesome words.

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.

Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.

The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.

Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness is the perfect companion to Mindfulness in Plain English. Written with the thoroughness and the masterful simplicity so characteristic of his teaching, Bhante Gunaratana presents essential guidelines for turning the Buddha's teachings on the Eightfold Path into living wisdom.

Everything has been created twice once on a mental plain and once on a physical plain.

We do not for example say that the person has a perfect knowledge of some language L similar to English but still different from it. What we say is that the child or foreigner has a 'partial knowledge of English' or is 'on his or her way' towards acquiring knowledge of English, and if they reach this goal, they will then know English.

I'm into books – I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.

Even as a kid, I wore J.C. Penney plain-pocket jeans because they were plain pockets. I didn't want anybody's name on my backside. I personally don't like to wear clothing that is named for somebody or has someone's likeness all over it.

I'm into books - I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.

[The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.

The Constitution isn't written in Chinese, Swahili or Sanskrit. It's in plain English.

Our government should speak a common language with the American people - plain English.

People are always saying, English, English, English rose, and I just feel so completely different.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

The picture. A great plain, comprising the entire Jerusalem district, where is the supreme Commander-in-Chief of the forces of good, Christ our Lord: another plain near Babylon, where Lucifer is, at the head of the enemy.

What does purpose mean? It means the deepest desire for our short lives to mean something. . . . To speak a language of purpose is to return to first principles and to be able to answer, in plain English, the plain questions of Why? Why should we chip in to help someone else? Why should we defer gratification? Why should we care about the long term? Why should we trust anyone who seems to be limiting our ability to do what we want?

The argument that there was a social pathology of the English Reformation, that there were fundamental changes in English society and the English church which made the Reformation inevitable, is academically stone dead.

James Joyce's English was based on the rhythm of the Irish language. He wrote things that shocked English language speakers but he was thinking in Gaelic. I've sung songs that if they were in English, would have been banned too. The psyche of the Irish language is completely different to the English-speaking world.

I saw Chekhov a number of times in English, and I thought that it translates very well in English, for some reason, from the Russian to the English.

When you go to school in Holland you learn to speak English and write in English - but English is different from the Scottish language!

Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.

A word about 'plain English.' The phrase certainly shouldn't connote drab and dreary language. Actually, plain English is typically quite interesting to read. It's robust and direct-the opposite of gaudy, pretentious language. You achieve plain English when you use the simplest, most straightforward way of expressing an idea. You can still choose interesting words. But you'll avoid fancy ones that have everyday replacements meaning precisely the same thing.

My fitness trainer's English, my physio's English, some of my friends are English. I don't have a problem with English people at all.

I don't mind plain women being puritans. It is the only excuse they have for being plain.

I think I'm plain. I'm normal. I'm plain. I try not to stand out. I don't wear colors.

We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.