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in their jaws, chew them, crunch them and spit them out again, and call that speaking.Fortunately they are by nature fairly silent, and although they gaze at us open-mouthed, they spare us long conversations.
Heinrich Heine on the English
    German is a language which was developed solely to afford the speaker the opportunity to spit at strangers under the guise of polite conversation.
National Lampoon
    Unmitigated noodles.
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany on the English
    One thing I will say for the Germans, they are always perfectly willing to give somebody else’s land to somebody else.
Will Rogers
    The English are, in my opinion, perfidious and cunning, plotting the destruction of the lives of foreigners, so that even if they humbly bend the knee, they cannot be trusted.
Leo de Rozmital, 1456
    I have the feeling this is all going to end very badly.
General Charles de Gaulle, to an aide, on first seeing California
    The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
Mary McCarthy, American novelist
    We are terribly afraid that some Americans spit on the floor, even when that floor is covered by good carpets. Now all claims to civilisation are suspended till this secretion is otherwise disposed of. No English gentleman has spit upon the floor since the Heptarchy.
Sydney Smith
    An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.
Alan Jay Lerner, My Fair Lady
    Oh, if the Queen were a man, she would like to go and give those horrid Russians whose word one cannot trust such a beating.
Queen Victoria, letter to Disraeli
    The English take their pleasures sadly, after the fashion of their country.
Maximilien de Béthune, Duc de Sully
    On the Continent people have good food: in England people have good table manners.
George Mikes
    The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
Paul Theroux
    The French have made of ingratitude – as of most things in life – an art.
Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post
    The English are the people of consummate cant.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
    Pakistan has many of the characteristics of mid-Victorian England – few, unfortunately, of the better ones.
John Bushell, British Ambassador to Pakistan
    The departure of the Wise men from the East seems to have been on a more extensive scale than is generally supposed, for no one of that description seems to have been left behind.
Sydney Smith on the East
    The only good that comes from the east is the sun.
Portuguese saying
    I must confess that hitherto I had never been able to take the Lebanese entirely seriously. Poised uneasily between Europe and the Orient, Christianity and Islam, the country, for all its beauty, seemed not really to belong anywhere. It appeared to be inhabited by a kind of quintessential wog with a rich patina of French chic, ready to trade with anyone in any commodity at his own price, existing in a kind of perpetual Nescafé society, hoping that the problems of the real world would somehowdisappear if not looked at too closely, and concentrating on the sensible occupation of making money.
Sir Paul Wright, British Ambassador to Lebanon
    In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
Orson Welles, The Third Man
    Since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.
Alan Coren on Switzerland
    Oats. A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language
    It is never difficult to