England

"I travelled among unknown men, in lands beyond the sea; nor, England! did I know till then, what love I bore to thee."

"'Tis a glorious charter, deny it who can, That's breathed in the words, "I'm an Englishman.""

"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."

"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."

"We are indeed a nation of shopkeepers."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The martial airs of England Encircle still the earth."

"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 Englishman."

"Shall our people, our nation, bear You to go hence with our gold? You that have come so far Unfought with, into our country, carrying war! Think you to get tribute softly and fair?"

"The south-west wind roaring in from the Atlantic.... is, I think the presiding genius of England."

"England is an amazing and paradoxical country; there are, in spite of the great emphasis upon "democracy," all indications of the existence of an aristocratic and oligarchic rule, yet this generally recognized fact caused little if any human resentment among the lower classes. There are actually a few dissatisfied, ambitious people among the middle classes who have a personal grudge against the old school tie and the reverses in the present war have made their protests appear louder than they are. It may be argued that these sentiments expressed are rather antiplutocratic than antiaristocratic. Yet the tacit and genuine, human acceptance of aristocratic or at least upper class leadership gives Britain the right to call itself a "democracy" without being one in reality. Hierarchic feelings always were very strong in England, but the extreme elasticity of the class system has always mitigated the apprehensions if aroused. Nowhere are classes more receptive to new elements, nowhere is it easier to rise socially, yet nowhere are the differences between the classes so marked as in England (with the exception of India and certain sections of the United States). Prewar Alpine Austria or Germany, Spain or even Poland were socially more democratic. Neither has any country in the world an Upper House made up solely of the lords and the bishops of the state Church. The Upper House of Hungary, a country notoriously "reactionary," has a large nonaristocratic majority and representatives of the Jewish faith (not to mention the Lutherans and Calvinists)."

"The search for wisdom in precedent flourished as if naturally among a people whom foreign observers at a later date have praised especially for its reliance upon tradition rather than upon those wide general theories which claim universal validity."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[Britons] would rather take the risk of civilizing communism than being kicked around by the unlettered pot-bellied money magnates of the United States."

"Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid, but exquisitely beautiful wife."

"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."

"England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her exchanges, her markets, her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight agricultural ones. She has in all her doings very marked and very original habits and traditions. In short, the nature, the structure, the very situation that are England's differ profoundly from those of the continentals."

"He spoke of the English, a noble race, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster, silent as deathless gods."

"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."

"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."

"We shall treat England like a beautiful flower, but we shan't water the pot."

"To me, England is the country, and the country is England. And when I ask myself what I mean by England, when I think of England when I am abroad, England comes to me through my various senses... The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been in England since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to function, for centuries the one eternal sight of England."

"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."

"O England, little mother, by the sleepless Northern tide, Having bred so many nations to devotion, trust, and pride, Very tenderly we turn With welling hearts that yearn Still to love you and defend you, - let the sons of men discern Wherein your right and title, might and majesty, reside."

"One of the paradoxes of history has been the way in which the name of England has come to be so closely associated with liberty on the one hand and tradition on the other hand."

"The historical development of England is based upon the fact that her frontiers against Europe are drawn by Nature, and cannot be the subject of dispute; that she is a unit sufficiently small for coherent government to have been established and maintained even under very primitive conditions; that since 1066 she has never suffered serious invasion; that no big modern armies have succeeded her feudal levies; and that her senior service is the navy, with which foreign trade is closely connected. In short, a great deal of what is peculiar in English history is due to the obvious fact that Great Britain is an island."

"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."

"To be an Englishman is to belong to the most exclusive club there is."

"Englishmen are patriots with their whole body. Not only in their heart, their stomach also seems here to feel for the native land. And I have often seen Englishmen round their dinner-table, busy with their roast beef in as quiet and proud a felicity as if they felt the whole worth of their favoured island on their tongues."

"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?"

"Wake up England."

"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."

"King Edward] was careful not to tear England violently from the splendid isolation in which she had wrapped herself."

"I am a great admirer of the Scots. I am quite friendly with the Welsh. I must confess to some sentiment about Old Ireland. But there is a forgotten, nay, almost a forbidden word, which means more to me than any other. That word is 'England'."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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, England!"

"Bring eine Katze nach England, sie wird miauen."

"England ist der Weiber Paradies, der Knechte Fegfeuer und der Pferde Hölle."

"Zum Glück ist Denken nicht ansteckend, jedenfalls nicht in England."