A Quote by W. H. Auden

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

W. H. Auden

Quote Topics

America Between Different England Know No Secret People Quite Relation Secret Secrets Shared Think Two Two People

Quote Author

W. H. Auden
English - Poet
February 21, 1907 - September 29, 1973

The thing about secrets is that they are usually best kept by just one person. That was the special thing about secrets. Some people seemed to think that the best way to keep a secret was to tell as many people as possible; what could possibly go wrong for a secret when there were so many people defending it?

Terry Pratchett

I really like knowing secrets, and once I do know that secret, I can keep it. But if I'm on the outside and I don't know the secret, that's a different story. I will try with all my power to get the secret out of the person who knows.

Ryan Lee

The world's most 'primitive' people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. It has grown with civilization, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation.

Marshall Sahlins

I love America - I'm not saying that I love Americans. I don't know. It just seems a bit more optimistic. I don't know - in England, if you do something successful, people hate you. Whereas in America, if you do something successful, people will pat you on the back and say, 'Hey, well done.' People are jealous and negative in England.

Andy Rourke

I am curious about people. I want to know their secrets... because I am the last person to whom I would tell a secret; people tell me their secrets.

Ruth Rendell

There's something quite magical that can happen when a secret is no longer a secret - or is a shared secret or a common secret. By allowing those boundaries to be porous, certain forms of oppression may be lifted.

Charlotte Cotton

I understand that the worst people in England at a time were ran to America, for some reason. Then slavery came and calls of aggression. But we've been there 600 years and there ain't no peace between black and whites because the cultures are different - like the Chinese and Mexicans cannot integrate: the music is different, the eating is different.

Muhammad Ali

Up until I think eighth grade - when I found out in front of a roomful of people - I believed that England and Great Britain were two entirely different places. Like I didn't know that England was a part of Great Britain. I thought they were completely separate in every way.

Paul F. Tompkins

I feel an enormous responsibility to bridge the gap between England and America, and be a sort of very quiet ambassador for my country to try to sort of do a "hands across the water" thing where they understand England and English people understand Americans. I adore America.

Julie Andrews

I think a lot of people, when the word leadership is used, they think of it as quite forceful and quite a rigid thing. I think people think I am like that. But people can lead in different ways.

Nigel Pearson

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.

Vladimir Lenin

I needed to recognize those secrets I was keeping from myself- secrets I had buried long ago. I needed Post Secret just as much as the other people who were mailing me their secrets.

Frank Warren

I'm gay. Megan's my girlfriend... These aren't secrets to people who know me. I don't feel like I've not lived my life. I think people have this assumption that if you're not talking about it, you must be hiding it, like it's this secret. That was never the case for me.

Sue Bird

As I lived on in America, I got to truly know the people of this country - so many kind and wonderful people, people of so many races - who helped me in so many ways. Who became my friends. I realized that underneath our different accents, habits, foods, religions, ways of thinking, we shared a common humanity.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I think everybody comes to the table with a different point of view and a different need...A lot of Beverly Lewis' material revolves around secrets and bringing those secrets to light. So, you know, there's always that theme, that...we're as sick as our secrets and once they're revealed we can be set free from them. So, that's definitely a theme that resonates.