Top 1200 English History Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

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

Saint George he was for England, And before he killed the dragon he drank a pint of English ale out of an English flagon.

I always lived in a multilingual society (Polish-Ukrainian, German-Ukrainian, English-Ukrainian), and was open to outside linguistic influences. I think it was within three years of coming to the US that I started writing in English, although purely for myself, not trying to get it published. Living in America, I was constantly in touch with English, and Ukrainian was for me a private language.

When I was in high school, I started learning English as my second foreign language, but my level of English at that time was very average.

I spent ten years in London; I trained there. But because I started in English, it kind of feels the most natural to me, to act in English, which is a strange thing. My language is Spanish; I grew up in Argentina. I speak to my family in Spanish, but if you were to ask me what language I connect with, it'd be English in some weird way.

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.

It would be a sad day for India if it has to inherit the English scale and the English tastes so utterly unsuitable to the Indian environment.

Black history isn’t a separate history. This is all of our history, this is American history, and we need to understand that. It has such an impact on kids and their values and how they view black people.

Everything has changed. When I was at school and was told I had better learn English, I said: What for? The English are a hell of a long way away!

English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.

My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.

Students of reading, writing and common arithmetick . . . Graecian [Greek], Roman, English and American history . . . should be rendered . . . worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

The revival of Hebrew, as a spoken language, is a fascinating story, which I'm afraid I cannot squeeze into a few sentences. But, let me give you a clue. Think about Elizabethan English, where the entire English language behaved pretty much like molten lava, like a volcano in mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is being reshaped and it's expanding very rapidly in various directions. This is not to say that every one of us Israeli writers is a William Shakespeare, but there is a certain similarity to Elizabethan English.

There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

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.

A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text.

I spend more time learning about Buddhism than English, which is why my English today is still bad.

Some may argue that countries like Japan and China improved economically without English, but they, too, are learning English fast.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

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.

I wouldn't have any fears about coming to England because I have played against English sides in the Champions League and studied the English game.

I was never particularly academic, so it was no great surprise when I failed my 11-plus and consequently went to Wibsey Secondary Modern. I did all right in English, history and music, which were the subjects that most interested me.

History class was a forty-minute squirm from which I would emerge unscathed by insight. Down the hall in English Lit, though, there were stories to be had, and it was stories I craved.

Yes, they broke the law, but we can't deport them. Let's get over this pointing fingers and do something about that, whether it - they have to pay a fine, learn to speak English, the history, you can do that. And then you have to give visas for the skills we need.

I always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.

Teaching English is an intrinsically radical act. Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?

To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.

I was an English major in college, and then I went to graduate school in English at the University of North Carolina for three years.

Having managed in Holland, Spain, and Germany, I had always hoped for the opportunity to manage in English football and be part of English culture.

However good an English team is, they will always have an additional advantage. It is that European players know that their English opponents will come at them in the belief they will win, and they can always be guaranteed never to stop fighting. They have a natural aggression that they are born with. If it ever goes, English football will lose its most valuable dimension.

I have a handicap in that English is not my first language. So even though I'm a writer, I don't write anymore because it's just harder in English.

Nobody can doubt Puerto Rico, sociologically, linguistically, culturally, and historically, is a nation. We have our own rich culture, thousand years of history, unique territory, and almost everyone's first language is Spanish, not English.

English is like music. The English language is really fit for singing. The notes match the feelings, and it makes sense.

Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.

Icelanders love to speak English. Their English is a joy to hear because of how colloquial and idiomatic it is, but they appreciate your efforts with Icelandic.

The English, in their ignorance, still have the romantic notion that Scottish schools are superior to English ones; they are at least a generation out of date.

American English is the greatest influence of English everywhere.

I had a weird accent. Dutch people speak American English, and my parents were Jamaican, with their own broken English.

I'm not a native English speaker but do post tweets in English.

Obviously, I would have been happier if Canada had not been conquered in the past by the English, if this part of North America had remained French, but you can't rewrite history.

So many of the bands that influenced me growing up were English, even if I didn't realise it. English pop ruled the world in the '80s!

English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.

One of my favorite tricks was taking a page and having the first student translate it from English into whatever language he or she was working on, and the next one would translate it back into English and then into the foreign language, and we'd go around the room and compare the two English versions at the end, and it would be amazing how much survived.

Your great country is wonderful at stealing pieces of history and using it for its own purposes, so there didn't seem to be anything particularly unusual about it but the English were incredibly exercised about it.

All who affirm the use of violence admit it is only a means to achieve justice and peace. But peace and justice are nonviolence...the final end of history. Those who abandon nonviolence have no sense of history. Rathy they are bypassing history, freezing history, betraying history.

A lot of linguists in the market, especially interpreters of foreign languages, do not have a great command over the English language, especially if they are translating into English.

When I went to high school - that's about as far as I got - reading my U.S. history textbook, well, I got the history of the ruling class. I got the history of the generals and the industrialists and the presidents that didn't get caught. How 'bout you? I got all of the history of the people who owned the wealth of the country, but none of the history of the people that created it.

English has always had a special fondness for other European languages, a neighborly soft spot - perhaps because Britain has been invaded by speakers of those languages from the onset of its recorded history.

I did modern English and American literature at Kent University, with no Chaucer and no Middle English: a perfect course.

I will be busy playing, getting in shape, and learning English, and being in a smaller town will help me do that. And I want the challenge of trying to get Bolton into Europe for the first time in their history.

What is translated from English and into English - and in what quantities - is a question of power.

I was a Barcelona fan. My favorite player was Ronaldinho. But I watched a lot of English football and admired lots of English teams.

It's important that top clubs don't lose sight of the fact that it's the English Premier League and English players should be involved.

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.

You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.

I speak English. I dream in it. I cannot separate my English from my Shona; I see the world with those two languages.

My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history.

The first English settlers of North America knew they were making history. New Englanders in particular were so sure of it that they started writing their own accounts of themselves as soon as they got here.

English civilization the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society that is what interests me.