England Quotes - Page 24

• In the olden days in England, you could be hung for stealing a sheep or a loaf of bread. However, if a sheep stole a loaf of bread and gave it to you, you would only be tried for receiving, a crime punishable by forty lashes with the cat or the dog, whichever was handy. If you stole a dog and were caught, you were punished with twelve rabbit punches, although it was hard to find rabbits big enough or strong enough to punch you.

  Mike Harding

  Dog, Strong, Humorous

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• The terrible thing in England is if you interview a thousand people, five hundred of them will talk like they're going into a Guy Ritchie movie and the other five hundred will be Mr. Darcy. So we had to find cool, working class kids with no profile who could be John Travolta and James Dean and people like that.

  Ricky Gervais

  Kids, Class, People

  "Ricky Gervais Calls CEMETERY JUNCTION His SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. Plus Info on His New HBO Animated Series". Interview with Steve "Frosty" Weintraub, collider.com. September 16, 2009.

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• You can drive 1,000 miles across America and find yourself, whereas if you drive a few miles from Slough you're in London anyway, or you hit Wales and you're in another country! Also, wherever you are in England it's still raining.

  Ricky Gervais

  Country, Rain, America

  "Cemetery Junction - Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• One of the depressing things in England is the total orthodoxy: the law is handed down from Downing Street.

  David Hare

  Depressing, Law, Downing Street

  "New Again: David Hare". Interview with Kathleen Tynan, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 29, 2015.

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• England is my home. I could never leave. I'd miss my family and friends too much.

  Melanie Brown

  Home, Missing, Family And Friends

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• A curious thing happened: the terrains of England began to impinge on my consciousness, altering, then effacing, the world outside the library window… I was wrapped in a pleasurable dreaminess. I was in a better place. If true life existed elsewhere, then I had almost found it.

  Garry Disher

  True Life, Library, World

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• Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters.

  William Wordsworth

  Water, Needs, Hours

  "London, 1802" l. 1 (1807)

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• My ability to persuade my wife to marry me was quite my most brilliant achievement ... Of course, it would have been impossible for any ordinary man to have got through what I had to go through in peace and war without the devoted aid of what we call, in England, one's better half.

  Winston Churchill

  War, Men, Wife

  "Churchill by Himself". Book by Richard Langworth, p. 511, 2008.

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• 'Keep England White' is a good slogan.

  Winston Churchill

  White, Slogans

  "The Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years 1950-57". Book by Harold Macmillan, p. 382, June 6, 2003.

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• The lights of Saxon England were going out, and in the gathering darkness a gentle, grey-beard prophet foretold the end. When on his death-bed Edward spoke of a time of evil that was coming upon the land his inspired mutterings struck terror into the hearers.

  Winston Churchill

  Light, Land, Evil

  Winston Churchill (1969). “History of the English Speaking Peoples: Based on the Text of 'A History of the English-speaking Peoples' by Sir Winston Churchill”

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• This souls'prison we call England.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Soul, Prison

  1919 Hector Hushabye. Heartbreak House, act 3.

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• I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.

  T. S. Eliot

  Thinking, America, Poetry

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• In fiction, I have been on a Zweig kick. In England over December, I noticed that many British newspapers' year-end recommenders were praising the Pushkin Press for reissuing several works by Stefan Zweig, a brilliant Austrian writer whose work brings to mind that of his compatriot Joseph Roth... these fictions are a treat of prewar European literature

  Sylvia Brownrigg

  Years, Year End, Mind

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• It was manifest to me that there was something in the Roman Catholic religion which made the priests very dear to the people; for I doubt whether in any village in England, had such an accident happened to the rector, all the people would have roused themselves at midnight to wreak their vengeance on the assailant.

  Bill Vaughan

  Catholic Religion, People, Doubt

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• England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.

  Karl Marx

  Idols, Skulls, Progress

  "The Future Results of British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853.

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• A great deal of capital, which appears to-day in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.

  Karl Marx

  Children, Yesterday, Blood

  Karl Marx (2016). “Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Economist”, p.450, VM eBooks

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• Every one knows that there are no real forests in England.The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London alderman.

  Karl Marx

  Real, Parks, Deer

  Karl Marx, Samuel Moore, Edward Aveling, Friedrich Engels (2011). “Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy”, p.803, Courier Corporation

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• Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay you low?

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Men, Lord, Lows

  'Song to the Men of England'

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• Thou art Justice ne'er for gold May thy righteous laws be sold As laws are in England thou Shield'st alike the high and low.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Art, Law, Justice

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1842). “The masque of Anarchy, a poem, with a preface by L. Hunt. To which is added, Queen Liberty; Song- To the men of England”, p.18

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• From purest wells of English undefiled None deeper drank than he, the New World's Child, Who in the language of their farm field spoke The wit and wisdom of New England folk.

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Children, World, Fields

  John Greenleaf Whittier (2012). “Personal Poems, Complete Volume IV., the Works of Whittier: Personal Poems”, p.237, tredition

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• We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth -- one for every five-hundred Americans; three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.

  Jimmy Carter

  Japan, West Germany, Skills

  Remarks at 100th Anniversary Banquet of the Los Angeles County Bar Association, Los Angeles, Cal., 4 May 1978

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• In England especially, I've found that if you bring up King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson at a dinner party or a social gathering, it's like throwing a Molotov cocktail into the room.

  Madonna Ciccone

  Kings, Party, Molotov Cocktail

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• It's like aversion therapy. You keep doing scenes over and over again with three women in the bed with you, and we had to do them all in one week. Three girls would step out and another three girls would step into the bed. It sounds like a fantasy but by the end of it, I just wanted to go for a hike on my own in the north of England, in the hills. Because it became a sort of "be careful what you wish for" kinda thing.

  Steve Coogan

  Girl, Wish, Bed

  "Q&A: Steve Coogan on Sex, Drugs & Bad Press". Interview with Eric Spitznagel, www.esquire.com. July 9, 2013.

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• And there is London!--England's heart and soul. By the proud flowing of her famous Thames, She circulates through countless lands and isles Her greatness; gloriously she rules, At once the awe and sceptre of the world.

  Robert Montgomery

  Heart, Greatness, Land

  Robert Montgomery (1836). “Selections from the Poetical Works: With Introductory Remarks, and an Appendix Containing Extracts from Satires, Notes, &c”, p.125

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• The Arts Council of England, in a 1998 report on 11 countries, found that Germany spent $85 per capita on the arts. The United States spent a shocking $6. And Canada, in its stubborn balance, spent $46... It's the Canadian way to be halfway between the Old and New worlds.

  Michael Audain

  Country, Art, Museums

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