“The English are busy; they don’t have time to be polite.”

A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century.

Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.

Love of reading enables a man to exchange the weary hours, which come to every one, for hours of delight.

Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour’s reading would not dissipate.

Countries are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but to their liberty.

The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed.

When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it and avarice possesses the whole community.

At our coming into the world we contract an immense debt to our country, which we can never discharge.

Luxury ruins republics; poverty, monarchies.

It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.

If I knew of something that could serve my nation but would ruin another, I would not propose it to my prince, for I am first a man and only then a Frenchman… because I am necessarily a man, and only accidentally am I French.

Talent is a gift which God has given us secretly, and which we reveal without perceiving it.

Trade is the best cure for prejudice.

It is difficult for the united states to be all of equal power and extent.

Knowledge humanizes mankind, and reason inclines to mildness; but prejudices eradicate every tender disposition.

The love of study is in us the only lasting passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruins.

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers’ growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries.

That is jargon – the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement – and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

Emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the “country” mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.

Anyone who doesn’t speak English isn’t worth speaking to

I love Evensong. There’s something sad and essentially English about it.

[The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.

I’m all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.