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In many parts of the world and on the Internet, the English language has become a common standard for international communication. Of course it also has its fair share of quirks and eccentricities, as many of the quotes in the list below will attest. I was somewhat surprised by the relative paucity of attributed quotes about the English language I was able to find from Internet sources. Many of the quotes that I found were actually about England or the English people, but not necessarily the language itself. I have included a few of these other types of English quotes here in order to round out the list at 50; however, I am planning to reserve most of the famous sayings about the country and culture of England for another post.

• The two most beautiful words in the English language are “check enclosed.” — Dorothy Parker
• If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur. — Doug Larson
• Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets. — Eddy Peters
• A bicycle can’t stand on its own because it’s two-tired. — English Proverb
• Here will be an old abusing of God’s patience and the king’s English. — William Shakespeare
• The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian “pahks” his “cah,” the lost r’s migrate southwest, causing a Texan to “warsh” his car and invest in “erl wells.” — Author Unknown
• We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language. — Oscar Wilde
• If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers. — Doug Larson
• If the French were really intelligent, they’d speak English. — Wilfred Sheed
• The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. — Derek Walcott

• Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets. — George Eliot
• English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway. — Author Unknown
• Me fail English? That unpossible! — Ralph Wiggum
• Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English. — Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960
• W (double U) has, of all the letters in our alphabet, the only cumbrous name, the names of the others being monosyllabic. This advantage of the Roman alphabet over the Grecian is the more valued after audibly spelling out some simple Greek word, like “epixoriambikos.” Still, it is now thought by the learned that other agencies than the difference of the two alphabets may have been concerned in the decline of “the glory that was Greece” and the rise of “the grandeur that was Rome.” There can be no doubt, however, that by simplifying the name of W (calling it “wow,” for example) our civilization could be, if not promoted, at least better endured. — Ambrose Bierce
• Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing. — Robert Benchley
• ‘I am’ is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that ‘I do’ is the longest sentence? — George Carlin
• What is the shortest word in the English language that contains the letters: abcdef? Answer: feedback. Don’t forget that feedback is one of the essential elements of good communication. — Author Unknown
• My opposition [to interviews] lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language. — James Thurber
• Reality is the only word in the English language that should always be used in quotes. — Author Unknown
• More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor. — General John W. Vessey
• English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common. — Bill Bryson
• The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck. — Cyril Connolly
• He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised. — Angela Carter
• There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren’t available to the Romans. — Bill Bryson
• A major cause of deterioration in the use of the English language is very simply the enormous increase in the number of people who are using it. — Anonymous
• The English language brings out the best in the Irish. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter. They hurl it at the sky like a paint pot full of rainbows, and then make it chant a dirge for man’s fate and man’s follies that is as mournful as misty spring rain crying over the fallow earth. — T.E. Kalem
• Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. — Bill Bryson
• The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ — Ronald Reagan
• Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one. — Henry David Thoreau
• To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up. — George Orwell
• My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language. — Edward Gibbon
• Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them. — Robert Graves
• English is just as much big business as the export of manufactured goods. There are problems with what you might call ‘after-sales service’, ‘delivery’ can be awkward, but at any rate the production lines are trouble free. — Randolph Quirk
• The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib. — Robert Burchfield
• I speak twelve languages. English is the bestest. — Stefan Bergman
• ENGLISH IS OUR LANGUAGE NO EXCETIONS LEARN IT — village of Crestwood welcome sign
• Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. — Evelyn Waugh
• My English is a mixture between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Tutu. — Billy Wilder
• From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put. — Winston Churchill
• In my sentences I go where no man has gone before…I am a boon to the English language. — George W. Bush
• Introducing ‘Lite’ - The new way to spell ‘Light’, but with twenty percent fewer letters. — Jerry Seinfeld
• When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it. — Henry David Thoreau
• The English have an extraordinary ability for flying into a great calm. — Alexander Woollcott
• I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it. — Carl Sandburg
• The English contribution to world cuisine - the chip. — John Cleese
• In two words, im possible. — Samuel Goldwyn
• The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner. — Margaret Halsey
• I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world. — Malcolm Bradbury
• Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all. — Walt Whitman