Top 1200 English-Speaking Quotes & Sayings

Who'd want to be a modernist writer in the English-speaking world?

I grew up speaking Spanish and English. My mother can speak Spanish, English, French and Italian, and she's pretty good at faking Portuguese. I wish that I spoke more languages than I do.

I grew up speaking Korean, but my dad spoke English very well. I learned a lot of how to speak English by watching television.

You know, I was a kid who had difficulty speaking English when I first immigrated. But in my head, when I read a book, I spoke English perfectly. No one could correct my Spanish. And I think that I retreated to books as a way, you know, to be, like, masterful in a language that was really difficult for me for many years.

We, the English educated Indians, often unconsciously make the terrible mistake of thinking that the microscopic minority of the English-speaking Indians is the whole of India.

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.

Anyone who doesn't speak English isn't worth speaking to

An important United Nations environmental conference went past 6:00 in the evening when the interpreters' contracted working conditions said they could leave. They left, abandoning the delegates unable to talk to each other in their native languages. The French head of the committee, who had insisted on speaking only in French throughout the week suddenly demonstrated the ability to speak excellent English with English-speaking delegates.

In 2014, I knew my English was not so bad, but I had no confidence in talking directly to an English-speaking reporter. I had to do a short interview with, I think, Reuters from France. I was so nervous. I practiced memorizing three sentences for two hours. But, I think that these kinds of interviews make me develop a lot, and that helps me.

A lot of Latinos are like me: third generation, English speaking.

I've received some English-speaking scripts, but I was not interested in them.

It is always a taut moment in a foreign country waiting to see if your English-speaking guide speaks English.

I hope the English-speaking world can see that I'm not only an Israeli actress.

It is the English-speaking nations who, almost alone, keep alight the torch of Freedom.

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 discovered that it's not really about the language. It's about how the words are pronounced and the delivery. We have plenty of good English-speaking comedians. It's O.K. if I have my accent, my gestures, my way of speaking.

When I was a kid, I resented my grandparents not speaking the perfect English I wanted to speak.

We have a very long legal system with the European Union, and we're English speaking.

I'm very aware when I'm speaking to the English of how flat my Mid-Atlantic American voice is.

The security and happiness of all minority groups in South Africa depend on the Afrikaner. Whether they are English- or German- or Portuguese- or Italian-speaking, or even Jewish-speaking, makes no difference.

London is the English-speaking theatre capital.

In the high-income English-speaking world, the elderly get treated very well indeed.

I chose English-speaking and English-thinking people to take decisions for Hindi programmes. It was a mistake.

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.

English should be our official language. Reading and speaking English are requirements to become a citizen.

Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.

My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.

I grew up listening to people speaking broken English. I probably picked that up. And I probably speak English almost as a second language.

With support jobs moving to China and India, it's not surprising that English-speaking countries' top frustration revolves around the difficulty of understanding customer service representatives. However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers' growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries.

I am the only living person in the English speaking world who didn't have the Narnia books as a child.

I've never lived in an English-speaking country, ever, but I lived in Austria. So, my second language is German. And when I went to school, I had a lot of classes in English.

I met one child there eleven years old, speaking three languages [in Guinea]. He could speak English, French and Malinke. Speaking my language actually better than I could. And this hypocrisy - they tell us here in America [ that black people can't be intelligent].

I only saw one English-speaking person all the way across Siberia.

I remember hearing my mom saying so many times we should never have left Korea. She would see the way that I was growing up and the fact that I was speaking English and not speaking Korean as well, and she would fear the things that we were forgetting.

You know, now there is always half of the new Quebecers who are going to the English CEGEP. After that, often they are going to work in English. So for us, that is so important. We are a real minority in North America. Two per cent of the population are French-speaking. We have to protect this reality.

Cholesterol to go with alcohol; all the bad things in English-speaking life end in -ol.

If you see the Sopranos, you're not going to be speaking in the Shakespearean English.

I grew up in New York in an English-speaking environment.

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 don't think the elite class is only speaking the good English.

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

My wife came here at age 8 not speaking a word of English and ended up in the president's Cabinet.

I would love to occasionally do English-speaking films, but the script is as important for me as the director.

It's part of my challenge as an actor, not only speaking English but speaking Spanish with a Mexican accent.

The biggest issue for me has been the language because I speak so much German now. I've had to focus on my English and find more words to describe what I want to say and also soften my tone. It was quite stiff from 20 years of speaking German, so when I started speaking more English, oh my god, my tongue was like: 'Argh'!

I just write like a grown man, because that's what I listen to. I'm not even speaking complicated English... I don't do five-syllable words, I don't do four-syllable words. This is English. Rudimentary English.

The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.

English is my first language, but musically speaking, I write my music in Spanish.

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.

Even when I speak English to my parents, I'll say an English word differently to my Chinese parents and friends than I do to my English-speaking friends - you know, I'll pronounce 'McDonald's' differently, because it feels right, and that's what I'm used to.

We've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.

Being born white in South Africa or anywhere in the empire and Commonwealth automatically conferred this special status. You had no problem finding a place to live, a job, trade union membership, access to social services. Being white, speaking English, you were accepted as English, entitled to all the rights of citizenship.

I think speaking English is beautiful.

I was raised speaking English and Spanish. And I also speak Danish. And I can get by in French and Italian. I've acted in Spanish and English, but when something has to do with emotions, sometimes I feel I can get to the heart of the matter better in Spanish.

Speaking of Sir Winston Churchill: He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.

Whether I go to English-speaking countries or non-English-speaking countries I can just modulate to what works for them.

I grew up speaking Vietnamese - that was my first language because my parents didn't speak any English, and I didn't learn English until I started school.

Somehow BB-8 and Chewie are really funny without even speaking English.

My sister and brother and I grew up speaking both languages - French to our father and English to our mother. But when we three kids are talking to each other, we use English.

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.