A Quote by Michael Moore

Should such an ignorant people lead the world? How did it come to this in the first place? 82 percent of us don't even have a passport! Just a handful can speak a language other than English.

Michael Moore

Quote Topics

Come Did English Even First First Place Handful How Ignorant Ignorant People Just Language Lead Other Passport People Percent Place Should Speak Than Us World

Quote Author

Michael Moore
American - Activist
Born: April 23, 1954

I am thankful that Brooklyn, a community of more than 2.6 million people of which nearly half speak a language other than English at home, stands as a shining example of how immigration and diversity have made us a safer and stronger place to live, work, and experience the American dream.

Eric Adams

Even though many Indians can read or speak English, for most, it is not their first language. At the office, we speak in English, but we consume our culture in our own language.

Amish Tripathi

I failed world geography, civics, Spanish and English. And when you fail Spanish and English, they do not consider you bilingual. They may call you bi-ignorant because you can't speak any language.

Tim Scott

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.

Russell Baker

You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can't even speak the same language?

Theresa May

I have a funny relationship to language. When I came to California when I was three I spoke Urdu fluently and I didn't speak a word of English. Within a few months I lost all my Urdu and spoke only English and then I learned Urdu all over again when I was nine. Urdu is my first language but it's not as good as my English and it's sort of become my third language. English is my best language but was the second language I learned.

Mohsin Hamid

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Russell Hoban

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

Richard Rorty

Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English.

Lev Grossman

My dad is an ob-gyn - he's retired now - and he wanted to come to the States to make a better life, for opportunity. My mom said that, on the plane ride here, I did not want to speak a word of English - I spoke Tagalog. And then, after the first day of school, I didn't want to speak anything but English.

Reggie Lee

Italian was my first foreign language. I speak it better than English.

Iman

People… they don’t write anymore – they blog. Instead of talking, they text, no punctuation, no grammar: LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people in a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.

David Duchovny

Immigrants to America help us with the work they do. They challenge us with new ideas, and they give us perspective. This is still the nation that more people around the world want to come to than any place else. That has to tell us something about ourselves. If around the world this is the place people want to come to so much, maybe there's more here than many of us realize-and that many of us can take advantage of.

Rudy Giuliani

Why in the world anyone in America is allowing another language (other than English) to be his first... I don't know

Margaret Thatcher

I usually just speak in English when I'm on the basketball court. For some reason, my mind never even tried to cross any other language when I'm playing basketball.