England is a geographical region of the United Kingdom, located in the southwestern part of the country. It is situated on the island of Great Britain and located in the northwest Europe. The largest city of England is London. The population of England number around 51 million making up the bulk of the United Kingdom's populace. The English language is the primary language of most inhabitants. England was formerly a sovereign country, until it joined with Scotland in 1707 to form Great Britain, which in turn became the United Kingdom in 1801.
- Neither my father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, great grandfather or great grandmother, nor any other relation that I know of, or care a farthing for, has been in England these one hundred and fifty years; so that you see I have not one drop of blood in my veins but what is American.
- John Adams, to a foreign ambassador (1785), as quoted in The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: Autobiography (1851), by Charles F. Adams, p. 392
- Citations on Google Books
- No man had once a greater veneration for Englishmen than I entertained. They were dear to me as branches of the same parental trunk, and partakers of the same religion and laws.
- BE IT DECLARED and enacted by this present Parliament and by the Authoritie of the same: That the People of England and of all the Dominions and Territoryes thereunto England a Commonwealth. belonging are and shall be and are hereby constituted, made, established, and confirmed to be a Commonwealth and free State And shall from henceforth be Governed as a Commonwealth and Free State by the supreame Authoritie of this Nation, the Representatives of the People in Parliament and by such as they shall appoint and constitute as Officers and Ministers under them for the good of the People and that without any King or House of Lords.
- An Act declaring England to be a Commonwealth (19 May 1649)
- An Englishman's home is his castle.
- Anonymous proverb, seventeenth century
- The characteristic danger of great nations, like the Romans or the English which have a long history of continuous creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions which they have created...
- Walter Bagehot, Lord Althorpe and the Great Reform Act of 1832, 1876.
- England! my country, great and free!
Heart of the world, I leap to thee!
- Philip James Bailey, Festus (1813), scene The Surface, line 376.
- The south-west wind roaring in from the Atlantic.... is, I think the presiding genius of England.
- Hilaire Belloc, Places, 1940.
- Whenever I think of Hell I cannot visualise it as a place of eternal fire, but as one of your English industrial towns on a day when the rain is pattering on the slate roofs and the wind is moaning up the street; a place where the horizon is bounded by dark factory chimneys, with crowds of women muffled up in waterproofs slipping in the puddles in their galoshes, with red noses peering out of heavy mufflers.
- Colonel Bertolini, The Waveless Plain, 1938.
- I will not cease from mental fight, not shall my sword sleep in my hand. Till we have built Jerusalem, in England's green and pleasant land.
- William Blake, From "Milton" - Preface, 1804.
- Good ale, the true and proper drink of Englishmen. He is not deserving of the name of Englishman who speaketh against ale, that is good ale.
- George Borrow, Lavengro, 1851.
- Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there.
- Robert Browning, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad".
- The men of England—the men, I mean of light and leading in England.
- England is a paradise for women, and hell for horses: Italy is a paradise for horses, hell for women.
- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III, Section III. Memb. 1. Subsect. 2.
- I know an Englishman. Being flattered, is a lamb; threatened, a lion.
- George Chapman, Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany before 1636.
- The strangest country I ever visited was England; but I visited it at a very early age, and so became a little queer myself. England is extremely subtle; and about the best of it there is something almost secretive; it is an amateur even more than aristocratic in tradition; it is never official.
- G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography (1936).
- When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, 'In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken'. Some chicken! Some neck!
- I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.
- Winston Churchill, speech, Lord Mayor's luncheon, London (November 10, 1942); in Robert Rhodes James, , ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963 (1974), vol. 6, p. 6695.
- The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars England—he should have said Britain, of course—always wins one battle—the last.
- People in England are the most illiterate in the developed world with many students graduating with only a basic grasp of English and math.
- Brendan Cole, "Young people in England have 'lowest literacy levels' in developed world says OECD" (29 January 2016), International Business Times, United Kingdom.
- Bind her, grind her, burn her with fire,
Cast her ashes into the sea,—
She shall escape, she shall aspire,
She shall arise to make men free;
She shall arise in a sacred scorn,
Lighting the lives that are yet unborn,
Spirit supernal, splendour eternal,
- Helen Gray Cone, Chant of Love for England (1915).
- I hope for nothing in this world so ardently as once again to see that paradise called England. I long to embrace again all my old friends there.
- Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Quoted in The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici by Christopher Hibbet, page 292.
- You often hear that the English climate has had a profound effect upon the English temperament. I don't believe it. I believe they were always like that.
- Will Cuppy in W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, Garden Rubbish and Other Country Bumps (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937).
- Charge of inferiority is an old dodge. It has been made available for oppression on many occasions...When England wants to set the heel of her power more firmly in the quivering heart of old Ireland, the Celts are an “inferior race.”
- Look at England, whose mighty power is now felt, and for centuries has been felt, all around the world. It is worthy of special remark, that precisely those parts of that proud island which have received the largest and most diversified populations, are to day the parts most distinguished for industry, enterprise, invention and general enlightenment. In Wales, and in the Highlands of Scotland the boast is made of their pure blood, and that they were never conquered, but no man can contemplate them without wishing they had been conquered. They are far in the rear of every other part of the English realm in all the comforts and conveniences of life, as well as in mental and physical development. Neither law nor learning descends to us from the mountains of Wales or from the Highlands of Scotland. The ancient Briton, whom Julius Caesar would not have as a slave, is not to be compared with the round, burly, amplitudinous Englishman in many of his qualities of desirable manhood.
- You were kind of an outlier if you even liked football and you were a girl in England.
- Jill Ellis, as quoted in "U.S. Coach Jill Ellis' choices put her on the path to Women's World Cup" (1 June 2015), by Kevin Baxter, The Los Angeles Times, California.
- God and nature have joined England and Ireland together. It is impossible to separate them.
- Earl of Clonwell, L.C.J. (Ir.), Case of Glennan and others (1796), 26 How. St. Tr. 460.
- The common law of England is the common law of Ireland, where the latter is not altered by statute.
- Perrin, J., Queen v. O'Connell (1843), 5 St. Tr. (N. S.) 63.
- England is a prison for men, a paradise for women, a purgatory for servants, a hell for horses.
- An Englishman is the unfittest person on Earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.
- Edmund Burke, as quoted in Paul Revere's Ride (1995), by David Hackett Fischer, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 30
- Go into the length and breadth of the world, ransack the literature of all countries, find, if you can, a single voice, a single book—find, I would almost say, as much as a single newspaper article, unless the product of the day, in which the conduct of England towards Ireland is anywhere treated except with profound and bitter condemnation.
- William E. Gladstone, speech on home rule (June 7, 1886); in A. W. Hutton and H. J. Cohen, eds., The Speeches of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone (1902), vol. 9, p. 127.
- We shall treat England like a beautiful flower, but we shan't water the pot.
- Hermann Goering, 1940. Quoted by Cyril Connolly, Ideas and Places.
- Non Angli sed Angeli (Not Angles but Angels).
- Pope Gregory I, commenting on the beauty of English captives exposed for sale in Rome.
- Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid, but exquisitely beautiful wife.
- Margaret Halsey, With Malice Toward Some, 1938.
- Hail England, dear England, true Queen of the West. With thy fair swelling bosom and ever-green vest. How nobly thou sittst in thine own steady light, on the left of thee Freedom, and Truth on the right. While the clouds at thy smile, break apart and turn bright! The Muses, full voiced, half encircle the seat, and Ocean comes kissing thy princely white feet. All hail! All hail! All hail to the beauty immortal and free. The only true goddess that rose from the sea.
- Leigh Hunt, National Song in the Examiner, 1815.
- The pleasantness of the English... comes in great measure from the fact of their each having been dipped into the crucible, which gives them a sort of coating of comely varnish and colour. They have been smoothed and polished by mutual social attrition. You see Englishmen here in Italy to particularly good advantage. In the midst of these false and beautiful Italians they glow with the light of the great fact, that after all they love a bathtub and hate a lie.
- Henry James, Letter to Mrs Henry James Sr, 1869.
- We I hope shall be left free to avail ourselves of the advantages of neutrality: and yet much I fear the English, or rather their stupid king, will force us out of it. (...) Common sense dictates therefore that they should let us remain neuter: ergo they will not let us remain neuter. I never yet found any other general rule for foretelling what they will do, but that of examining what they ought not to do.
- The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, and the final expulsion of England from the American continent.
- She discovered the seasons. No other country has such seasons or complexions in a year. And every place is beautiful in its way, from Cornwall to Cumberland. The people are as peculiar as the place, not the Normans, but the silent, staring English. Slaves in their own country. What do they make of it? Perhaps, I'm cooler than the others. There was no heat at my conception. But I love this cool, green country. So old, so deceptively deep.
- English superiority and American obedience.
- He spoke of the English, a noble race, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster, silent as deathless gods.
- James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922.
- England's innermost truth and at the same time her most valuable contribution to the assets of the human family is the "gentleman", rescued from the dusty chivalry of the early Middle Ages and now penetrating into the remotest corner of modern English life. It is an ultimate principle hat never fails to carry conviction, the shining armour of the perfect knight in soul and body, and the miserable coffin of poor natural feelings.
- C.G. Jung, The Complications of American Psychology, 1930.
- England is the only country in Europe that can boast of having improved its agriculture and the cultivation of its soil beyond that of any other European nation. The condition of English agriculture, compared with that of our own, is like light contrasted with shade.
- Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi Von denen Hinternissen einer bluhenden Landwirtschaft, 1761.
- Scientific progress over the past years has been amazing. Man through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains, so that today it's possible to eat breakfast in New York City and supper in London, England.
- English people ... never speak, excepting in cases of fire or murder, unless they are introduced.
- Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Book of Beauty, 1833 (1832), Experiments.
- The real tragedy of England as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile.
- D.H. Lawrence, Nottingham and the Mining Countryside, 1936.
- An Englishman hath three qualities, he can suffer no partner in his love, no stranger to be his friend, nor to be dared by any.
- John Lyly, Euphues and his England (16th century).
- There'll always be an England, while there's a country lane. Wherever there's a cottage small, beside a field of grain... There'll always be an England... England shall be free if England means as much to you as England means to me.
- The English take their pleasures sadly after the fashion of their country.
- Maximillian, Duc de Sully, (1559-1641), Memoirs.
- We do not intend to part from the Americans and we do not intend to be satellites. I am sure they do not want us to be so. The stronger we are, the better partners we shall be; and I feel certain that as the months pass we shall draw continually closer together with mutual confidence and respect.
- Harold Macmillan, broadcast to the nation, London (January 17, 1957); in Vital Speeches of the Day (February 1, 1957), p. 247. This was his first broadcast as prime minister.
- Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles.
- George Mikes, How to be an Alien.
- There is now scarcely any outlet for energy in this country except business. The energy expended in that may still be regarded as considerable. What little is left from that employment, is expended on some hobby; which may be a useful, even a philanthropic hobby, but is … generally a thing of small dimensions. The greatness of England is now all collective: individually small, we only appear capable of anything great by our habit of combining; and with this our moral and religious philanthropists are perfectly contented. But it was men of another stamp than this that made England what it has been; and men of another stamp will be needed to prevent its decline.
- I am American bred; I have seen much to hate here - much to forgive. But in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live.
- Alice Duer Miller, The White Cliffs, 1940.
- Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation not slow and dull, but of quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discours, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that humane capacity can soar to.
- John Milton, Aeropagitica (1644).
- England is a nation of shopkeepers.
- To be an Englishman is to belong to the most exclusive club there is.
- Ogden Nash, England Expects.
- England expects every man to do his duty.
- Horatio Nelson, Signal to the Fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar, 1805.
- [Britons] would rather take the risk of civilizing communism than being kicked around by the unlettered pot-bellied money magnates of the United States.
- Tom O'Brien, M.P., as quoted by The New York Times (August 23, 1949), p. 4.
- England has not had the time, nor made the effort, to develop an inclusive, civic, progressive nationalism. It is left with a nationalism that is scarcely articulated in positive terms at all and that thus plugs into the darker energies of resentment and xenophobia.
- England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
- In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the New Statesman and the News Chronicle cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.
- Freedom has been haunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England has given her warning to depart.
- Thomas Paine, in Common Sense (1776).
- I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me; but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.
- William Pitt the Younger, speech at the Lord Mayor's banquet at Buildhall, November 9, 1805. This was Pitt's last public utterance.
- Those proud Islanders whom many unduly honour, know no watchword but gain and enjoyment. Their zeal for knowledge is only a sham fight, their worldly wisdom a false jewel, skilfully and deceptively composed, and their sacred freedom itself too often and too easily serves self-interest. They are never in earnest with anything that goes beyond palpable utility. All knowledge they have robbed of life and use only as dead wood to make masts and helms for their life's voyage in pursuit of gain.
- Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, J. Oman, trans. (1898), pp. 9-10.
- O England! model to thy inward greatness,
Like little body with a mighty heart,
What might'st thou do, that honour would thee do,
Were all thy children kind and natural!
But see thy fault!
- This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,—
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
- There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find an Englishman doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.
- George Bernard Shaw, Man of Destiny, one act play, in his Complete Plays with Prefaces, vol. 1, p. 743 (1962).
- The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and to common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants, and the fatuity of idiots.
- Sydney Smith, Two Letters on the Subject of the Catholics (London: J. Budd, 1807), Letter 2, p. 23.
- Saint George shalt called bee,
Saint George of mery England, the sign of victoree.
- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1589-96), Book I, Canto X, Stanza 61.
- I hold that the real policy of England—apart from questions which involve her own particular interests—is to be the champion of justice and right; pursuing that course with moderation and prudence, not becoming the Quixote of the world, but giving the weight of her moral sanction and support wherever she thinks that justice is, and wherever she thinks that wrong has been done.
- Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, remarks in the House of Commons defending his foreign policy (March 1, 1848); in Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3d series, vol. 97, col. 122.
- I think England is the very place for a fluent and fiery writer. The highest hymns of the sun are written in the dark. I like the grey country. A bucket of Greek sun would drown in one colour the crowds of colour I like trying to mix for myself out of grey flat insular mud.
- Dylan Thomas, Letter to Lawrence Durrell, December 1938.
- A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth--science--which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.
- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, (1865-1869). Book 9, Chapter 10.
- People in Scotland don't enjoy having decisions made for them in England any more than the English like having decisions made for them in Belgium. Nationalism in Britain cut both ways.
- Lord, open the eyes of the king of England.
- The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.
- Horace Walpole, English art historian, writer, antiquarian and politician in a letter to Sir Horace Mann (24 November 1774).
- Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
- To me England means great courage, great standards and great wit. I could move to England in a second.
- Sigourney Weaver (b. 1949), American actress. 'The World According To Sigourney Weaver', an interview in Live magazine, The Mail on Sunday (UK) newspaper, 24 October 2010.
- I travelled among unknown men, in lands beyond the sea; nor, England! did I know till then, what love I bore to thee.
- William Wordsworth, composed 1801.
Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations
- Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 222-25.
- Let Pitt then boast of his victory to his nation of shopkeepers—(Nation Boutiquiere).
- Said by Bertrand Barère, June 16, 1794 before the National Convention. Attributed to Napoleon, Scott's Life of Napoleon. Claimed as a saying of Francis II to Napoleon.
- Quoique leurs chapeaux sont bien laids,
Goddam! j'aime les anglais.
- In spite of their hats being very ugly, Goddam! I love the English.
- Pierre-Jean de Béranger.
- Ah! la perfide Angleterre!
- Ah! the perfidious English!
- Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Sermon on the Circumcision, preached at Metz. Quoted by Napoleon on leaving England for St. Helena.
- If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
- Robert Brooke, The Soldier.
- Oh, to be in England,
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf,
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
- Robert Browning, Home Thoughts from Abroad.
- Men of England! who inherit
Rights that cost your sires their blood.
- Thomas Campbell, Men of England.
- Britannia needs no bulwarks
No towers along the steep;
Her march is o'er the mountain wave,
Her home is on the deep.
- Thomas Campbell, Ye Mariners of England.
- Il y a en Angleterre soizante sectes religieuses différentes, et une seule sauce.
- In England there are sixty different religions, and only one sauce.
- Marquis Caraccioli.
- A certain man has called us, "of all peoples the wisest in action," but he added, "the stupidest in speech."
- Thomas Carlyle, The Nigger Question.
- Where are the rough brave Britons to be found
With Hearts of Oak, so much of old renowned?
- Mrs. Centilivre, Cruel Gift. Epilogue written by Nicholas Rowe. He was … a heart of oak, and a pillar of the land. Wood—Ath. Oxon. (1691), II. 221. Yonkers that have hearts of oake at fourscore yeares. Old Meg of Hertfordshire. (1609). Those pigmy tribes of Panton street, / Those hardy blades, those hearts of oak, / Obedient to a tyrant's yoke. A Monstrous good Lounge. (1777), p. 5.
- Be England what she will,
With all her faults, she is my country still.
- Charles Churchill, The Farewell.
- 'Tis a glorious charter, deny it who can,
That's breathed in the words, "I'm an Englishman."
- Eliza Cook, An Englishman.
- England, with all thy faults, I love thee still—
My Country! and, while yet a nook is left
Where English minds and manners may be found,
Shall be constrained to love thee.
- William Cowper, The Task (1785), Book II, line 206.
- Without one friend, above all foes,
Britannia gives the world repose.
- William Cowper, To Sir Joshua Reynolds.
- We are indeed a nation of shopkeepers.
- Benjamin Disraeli, The Young Duke, Book I, Chapter XI.
- Roused by the lash of his own stubborn tail,
Our lion now will foreign foes assail.
- John Dryden, Astræa Redux, line 117.
- In these troublesome days when the great
Mother Empire stands splendidly isolated in Europe.
- Hon. George Eulas Foster, speech in the Canadian House of Commons (Jan. 16, 1896).
- Ils s'amusaient tristement selon la coutume de leur pays.
- They [the English] amuse themselves sadly as is the custom of their country.
- Attributed to Froissart. Not found in his works. Same in Duc de Sully's Memoirs (1630). ("l'usage" instead of "coutume.") See Emerson—English Traits, Chapter VIII. Hazlitt—Sketches and Essays. Merry England. ("se rejouissoient" instead of "s'amusaient.").
- Hearts of oak are our ships,
Jolly tars are our men,
We always are ready, steady, boys, steady,
We'll fight and will conquer again and again.
- David Garrick, Hearts of Oak.
- Wake up England.
- King George V., when Prince of Wales. Speech at Guildhall after a trip around the world.
- He is an Englishman!
For he himself has said it,
And it's greatly to his credit,
That he's an Englishman!
- For he might have been a Rooshian
A French or Turk or Proosian,
Or perhaps Itali-an.
But in spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remains an Englisliman.
- W. S. Gilbert, H.M.S. Pinafore (1878).
- The land of scholars, and the nurse of arms.
- Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller (1764), line 356.
- We have stood alone in that which is called isolation—our splendid isolation, as one of our Colonial friends was good enough to call it.
- Lord Goschen, speech at Lewes (Feb. 26, 1896).
- Anglica gens est optima flens et pessima ridens.
- The English race is the best at weeping and the worst at laughing. (The English take their pleasures sadly).
- Thomas Hearne, Reliquiæ Hearnianæ (Ed. 1857), Volume I, p. 136. (Source referred to Chamberlayne, Anglicæ Notitia (1669). From old Latin saying quoted in Kornmannus, De Linea Amoris, Chapter II, p. 47. (Ed. 1610). Binder, Novus Thesaurus Adagiorum Latinorum. No. 2983. Neander's Ethic Vetus et Sapiens (1590). (With "sed" not "et," "Rustica" not "Anglica.").
- What have I done for you,
England, my England?
What is there I would not do,
England, my own?
- William Ernest Henley, England, My England.
- His home!—the Western giant smiles,
And turns the spotty globe to find it;—
This little speck the British Isles?
'Tis but a freckle,—never mind it.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., A Good Time Going.
- Old England is our home and Englishmen are we,
Our tongue is known in every clime, our flag on every sea.
- Mary Howitt, Old England is Our Home.
- The whole [English] nation, beyond all other mortal men is most given to banquetting and feasts.
- Paulus Jovius, Hist, Book II. Translation by Burton, Anatomy of a Melancholy.
- Never was isle so little, never was sea so lone,
But over the scud and the palm-trees an English flag was flown.
- Rudyard Kipling, English Flag.
- Winds of the World give answer! They are whimpering to and fro—
And what should they know of England who only England know?—
- Rudyard Kipling, English Flag.
- Whether splendidly isolated or dangerously isolated, I will not now debate; but for my part, I think splendidly isolated, because this isolation of England comes from her superiority.
- Sir Wilfred Laurier, speech in the Canadian House of Assembly (Feb. 5, 1896).
- The New World's sons from England's breast we drew
Such milk as bids remember whence we came,
Proud of her past wherefrom our future grew,
This window we inscribe with Raleigh's fame.
- Lowell. Inscription on the Window presented to St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, London, by American citizens in honor of Sir Walter Raleigh. (1882).
- Non seulement l'Angleterre, mais chaque Anglais est une ile.
- Not only England, but every Englishman is an island.
- Novalis, Fragments (1799).
- Let us hope that England, having saved herself by her energy, may save Europe by her example.
- William Pitt. In his last Speech, made at the Lord Mayor's Banquet at Guildhall. (Nov. 9, 1805). As reported by Macaulay—Misc. Writings, Volume II, p. 368. But Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example. Stanhope's Life of Pitt, Volume IV, p. 346. Reported as told him by the Duke of Wellington. (1838). Neither the Morning Herald, nor the Times of Nov. 11, 1805 mention these words in comment on the speech. The London Chronicle and St. James's Chronicle give different versions.
- [King Edward] was careful not to tear England violently from the splendid isolation in which she had wrapped herself.
- Poincaré, speech at Cannes (April 13, 1912).
- Oh, when shall Britain, conscious of her claim,
Stand emulous of Greek and Roman fame?
In living medals see her wars enroll'd,
And vanquished realms supply recording gold?
- Alexander Pope, Moral Essays, Epistle to Addison, line 53.
- Dieu et mon droit.
- God and my right.
- Password of the day given by Richard I, to his army at the battle of Gisors. In memory of the victory it was made the motto of the royal arms of England.
- The martial airs of England
Encircle still the earth.
- Amelia B. Richards, The Martial Airs of England.
- There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.
- George Bernard Shaw, The Man of Destiny.
- Oh, Britannia the pride of the ocean
The home of the brave and the free,
The shrine of the sailor's devotion,
No land can compare unto thee.
- Davis Taylor Shaw, Britannia. Probably written some time before the Crimean War, when it became popular. Changed to "Columbia the Gem of the Ocean" when sung by Shaw in America. Claimed that Thomas à Becket wrote words for Shaw. See Notes and Queries. (Aug. 20, 1899). Pp. 164, 231.
- To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a nation of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.
- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Volume II, Book IV, Chapter VII, Part III.
- There is no land like England,
Where'er the light of day be;
There are no hearts like English hearts,
Such hearts of oak as they be;
There is no land like England,
Where'er the light of day be:
There are no men like Englishmen,
So tall and bold as they be!
And these will strike for England,
And man and maid be free
To foil and spoil the tyrant
Beneath the greenwood tree.
- Alfred Tennyson, Foresters, Song.
- First drink a health, this solemn night,
A health to England, every guest;
That man's the best cosmopolite,
Who loves his native country best.
May Freedom's oak forever live
With stronger life from day to day;
That man's the true Conservative
Who lops the moulder'd branch away.
Hands all round!
God the tyrant's hope confound!
To this great cause of Freedom drink, my friends,
And the great name of England round and round.
- Alfred Tennyson, Hands all around. In Memoirs of Tennyson by his son, Volume I, p. 345.
- When Britain first at Heaven's command,
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung this strain;
"Rule Britannia! rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves."
- James Thomson, Masque of Alfred. Written by Thompson and Mallet. Mallet rearranged the Masque Alfred for the stage, and introduced Thompson's Song. See Dr. Dinsdale's edition of Mallet. (1851), p. 292.
- A shopkeeper will never get the more custom by beating his customers, and what is true of a shopkeeper is true of a shopkeeping nation.
- Josiah Tucker, Four Tracts on Political and Commercial Subjects. (The words are said to have been used by Dr. Tucker, in a sermon, some years before they appeared in print).
- In every war England wins one battle. The last one.
- Eleftherios Venizelos on his belief that the Allies would win in WWI.
- Froth at the top, dregs at bottom, but the middle excellent.
- Voltaire, Description of the English Nation.
- Set in this stormy Northern sea,
Queen of these restless fields of tide,
England! what shall men say of thee,
Before whose feet the worlds divide?
- Oscar Wilde, Ave Imperatrix.
- Encyclopedic article on England at Wikipedia
- Media related to England at Wikimedia Commons
- Wikijunior:Europe/England at Wikibooks
- England travel guide from Wikivoyage