English History Quotes

• Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'

  Winston Churchill

  War, Men, Years

  Speech in House of Commons, 18 June 1940

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• This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

  William Shakespeare

  Blessed, Precious Stones, Paradise On Earth

  1595 John of Gaunt. Richard II, act 2, sc.1, l.40-50.

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• This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-Paradise.

  William Shakespeare

  Kings, Precious Stones, Paradise On Earth

  'Richard II' (1595) act 2, sc. 1, l. 40

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• From William of Orange to William Pitt the younger there was but one man without whom English history must have taken a different turn, and that was William Pitt the elder.

  Albert Bushnell Hart

  Taken, Men, Orange

  Albert Bushnell Hart, Ph.D. (1909). “Epochs of American History”

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• Few people know anything of the English history but what they learn from Shakespear; for our story is rather a tissue of personal adventures and catastrophes than a series of political events.

  Elizabeth Montagu

  Adventure, People, Political

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• English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.

  Malcolm Bradbury

  Father, Hate, Men

  Malcolm Bradbury (2012). “Stepping Westward”, p.168, Pan Macmillan

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• English history consists largely of royal people getting their heads chopped off...Needless to say, this brand of history was a hit with our son.

  Dave Barry

  Funny, Humorous, Son

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• English history is aristocracy with the doors open. Who has courage and faculty, let him come in.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Doors, Class, Aristocracy

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.243

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• It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Real, Confusion, Patterns

  "Peter Ackroyd: 'I just want to tell a story'" by Euan Ferguson, www.theguardian.com. August 25, 2011.

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• There is no other Parliament like the English. For the ordinary man, elected to any senate, from Perisa to Peru, they may be a certain satisfaction in being elected... but the man who steps into the English Parliament takes his place in a pageant that has ever been filing by since the birth of English history... York or Lancaster, Protestant or Catholic, Court or Country, Roundhead or Cavalier, Whig or Tory, Liberal or Conservative, Labour or Unionist, they all fit into that long pageant that no other country in the world can show.

  Josiah Wedgwood

  Country, Men, Long

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• The attitude of the English towards English history reminds one a good deal of the attitude of a Hollywood director towards love.

  Margaret Halsey

  Attitude, Insulting, Directors

  Margaret Halsey (1938). “With Malice Toward Some”

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• When I came to write my Thomas Cromwell books, I moved onto the center ground of English history, but I was never there before. I didn't feel it was my history particularly, coming from Northern Britain, being of Irish extraction, being a cradle Catholic. The image of England I grew up with felt somewhere else. There was an official England in postcards, but it wasn't one I had visited. But I decided to march onto the center ground and occupy it whether it was mine or not.

  Hilary Mantel

  Book, Writing, Somewhere Else

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants.

  William Butler Yeats

  Italian, Men, Land

  William Butler Yeats, Richard J. Finneran, George Bornstein (2007). “The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays”, p.82, Simon and Schuster

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• But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not been an honest dullard.

  James G. Frazer

  Hands, America, Use

  "The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion". Book by James G. Frazer, 1890.

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• The more you look back into English history, the more you are forced to the conclusion that alongside civility and the deeply held convictions about individual rights, the English have a natural taste for disorder.

  Anna Pavlova

  Rights, Looks, Taste

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• Just heard Paul Scholes has retired, best I’ve ever played against by a mile. Most technically gifted player in english history. Legend.

  Joey Barton

  Player, Legends, Miles

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• We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales.

  Evelyn Waugh

  England, Influence, Disaster

  'Decline and Fall' (1928) pt. 1, ch. 8

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• The present illegitimacy ratio is not only unprecedented in the past two centuries; it is unprecedented, so far as we know, in American history going back to colonial times, and in English history from Tudor times.

  Gertrude Himmelfarb

  Past, Two, Historical

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• The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books--great, big, fat ones--French and German as well as English--history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much.

  Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Girl, Book, Missing

  Frances Hodgson Burnett (2016). “A Little Princess”, p.9, Xist Publishing

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• I think in some parts of our English history we've had huge amounts of almost too much great comedy. You kind of wonder how so much great work could come out of one country.

  Kate Bush

  Country, Thinking, Too Much

  Interview with Dimitri Ehrlich, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 23, 2011.

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