Otto von Bismarck
Statesman, Chancellor
"The most significant event of the 20th century will be the fact that the North Americans speak English."
Speak English quotes
Speak English
102 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Theresa May
Politician
"Sham marriages have been widespread; people have been allowed to settle in Britain without being able to speak English; and there have not been rules in place to stop migrants becoming a burden on the taxpayer. We are changing all of that."
Lewis Carroll
Author, Mathematician
"Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either!"
Scott Adams
Cartoonist
"We know the goats are imported because they don't speak English."
Alan Turing
Mathematician, Logician, Cryptanalyst
"We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English."
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"My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French."
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"The people who perpetrated the terror of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings are something different because these people were obviously not desperate and poor refugee dwellers. They were middle class, educated enough to speak English, to be able to go to flight school, to come to America, to live in Florida."
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"In this country, it doesn't make any difference where you were born. It doesn't make any difference who your parents were. It doesn't make any difference if, like me, you couldn't even speak English until you were in your twenties."
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"Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one."
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"I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in translation."
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"I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent."
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"I was in the second year of my PhD when I first had the idea - I'd recently started working as a translator, which meant firstly that I was hearing about amazing-sounding books from other translators, and also that I was getting enough of an insider's view of the publishing industry to be aware of all the implicit biases that made it so difficult for these books to ever get published, especially if they weren't from European languages (harder to discover, editors can't read the original, lack of funding programmes, authors who don't speak English)."
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"He speaks English, Spanish, and he's bilingual too."
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"Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used."
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"I just said let's get some poets on tv. And when they said that sounded unlikely, I made it worse. I said, no man, I want to put a bunch of black poets on stage, too. Some Latino poets who barely speak English and Asian poets who can't believe how discriminated against they are. It was luck nad being in the right place. I wasn't saying nothing somebody else wasn't saying but they wouldn't hear it from them."
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"Aw, come on. I barely speak English, unless we're talking about the Lowcountry kind."
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"MTV and video games have solved that problem as far as most of humanity goes. That, and telly, as it were.” “Telly?” Who was that? He grunted in amusement. “Television, of course. Don’t you speak English?” “You sure don’t,” I muttered. Shaking his head, he frowned at me."
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"Our leaders increasingly see fit to lecture the ethnic minorities on the need to integrate, including of course the need to speak English. What about the need, though, for Britain to integrate with the rest of the world?"
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