England

"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."

"Non Angli sed Angeli."

"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!"

"The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars England—he should have said Britain, of course—always wins one battle—the last."

"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."

"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."

"Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way."

"Politics in this country seem to interest everyone. I suppose this taste is cultivated by the liberty which the government affords, and in which Englishmen take great pride, for they value this gift more than all the joys of life, and would sacrifice everything to retain it. Even the populace will make proof of this, and will give you to understand that there is no country in the world where such perfect freedom may be enjoyed as in England."

"It may be said with entire justice that Englishmen are very brave; they give a convincing proof of this in seeming to fear neither death nor danger. Their soldiers fight with the greatest valour."

"England undoubtedly is, in my opinion, the most happily governed country in the world."

"England, a country where people cry in their hearts and not with their eyes"

"To me England means great courage, great standards and great wit. I could move to England in a second."

"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."

"There is no Easter Bunny, there is no Tooth Fairy and there is no Queen of England."

"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."

"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."

"And so Britain is now called England, taking the name of the victors."

"On the other side, the English troops, assembled from all parts of the neighbourhood, took post at a place which was anciently called Senlac, many of them personally devoted to the cause of Harold, and all to that of their country, which they were resolved to defend against the foreigners... The English, on their side, made a stout resistance, each man straining his powers to the utmost... At length the indomitable bravery of the English threw the Bretons...into confusion... Towards the evening, the English finding that their king and the chief nobles of the realm, with a great part of their army, had fallen...they had recourse to flight as expeditiously as they could... There the flower of the youth and nobility of England covered the ground far and near stained with blood."