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but little mead – an English feast! And I meant to earn a shilling solid reward for my harper’s art. So I began with ready speed, to sing an ode to the kinsmen; but all I got was mockery, spurning of my song, and grief.
Lewis Glyn Cothi or Tudur Penllyn, tr. from the Welsh by Kenneth Jackson, The English Wedding
    But Lord! to see the absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange.
Samuel Pepys, Diary
    A Welshman is a man who prays on his knees on Sunday and preys on his friends the rest of the week.
Insult, probably of English origin
    The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.
Dylan Thomas on Wales
    There are still parts of Wales where the only concession to gaiety is a striped shroud.
Gwyn Thomas
    The Welsh are so damn Welsh that it looks like affectation.
Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh to D.B. Wyndham Lewis
    The relationship between the Welsh and the English is based on trust and understanding. They don’t trust us and we don’t understand them.
Dudley Wood
    Fucking Welsh.
Tony Blair, reported by his press secretary Alastair Campbell
    Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.
Brendan Behan
    Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.
George Bernard Shaw
    I return your seasonal greeting card with contempt. May your hypocritical words choke you and may they choke you early in the New Year, rather than later.
Professor Kennedy Lindsay, a Vanguard member of the Northern Assembly, returning a Christmas card from the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dr Garret FitzGerald, in the Irish Times
    Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    An Irish queer is a fellow who prefers women to drink.
Sean O’Faolain
    I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Attrib.
    An ass in Germany is a professor in Rome.
German Song
    Life is never so bad that Germany is better.
Jeremy Clarkson
    German humour is no laughing matter.
Mark Twain
    I like Germany so much, I think there should be two of them.
François Mauriac on German reunification
    Ah, so next time we shall not be able to hear them coming.
Pierre Mendès-France, former French Prime Minister, on news that German soldiers’ jackboots were now fitted with rubber soles, 1960
    Germany is too big for Europe, too small for the world.
Henry Kissinger
    To the small extent that it still exhibits a smiling countenance it is, as Hofmannsthal said, because it no longer has any muscles in its face. There has indeed always been something feminine about Vienna, perhaps because of the strong Slav elements in its population, and the combination of aimlessness and femininity has unfortunate results. It makes it a sad and rather mean town. The people seem to lack charity towards each other. They rather enjoy denouncing each other for minor breaches of the regulations. They give vent to explosions of rage when inconvenienced in small ways. They cling to what they think of as their old traditions, treacly and anaemic though these were for the most part. The dowdy clothes, the grim municipal tenement buildings and the general grubbiness make Vienna at certain times of the year look more like an Iron-Curtain town than one which belongs to the West. Indeed the inhabitants of Prague and of Budapest seem to me to walk with a jauntier step than do the Viennese. There is certainly no more depressing sight than that of the self-conscious crowds of businessmen and their ladies at the famous opera ball, supposedly the glittering climax of a brilliant carnival season. Austria has the highest published suicide-rate of any country in the world and Vienna makes a disproportionate contribution to this record.
Sir Anthony Rumbold, British ambassador to Austria, on Vienna
    The devil take these people and their language! They take a dozen monosyllabic words