16 George Mikes Quotes

George Mikes quotes

1. On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners.

2. Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles.

3. An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.

4. The trouble with tea is that originally it was quite a good drink. So a group of the most eminent British scientists put their heads together, and made complicated biological experiments to find a way of spoiling it. To the eternal glory of British science their labour bore fruit.

1. THE British are brave people. They can face anything, except reality.

2. The British suffer from a most unfortunate superiority complex - unjustified even under Victoria and most certainly hopelessly out-of-date today.

3. Remember that those five hundred words an average Englishman uses are far from being the whole vocabulary of the language. You may learn another five hundred and another five thousand and yet another fifty thousand and still you may come across a further fifty thousand you have never heard of before, and nobody else either.

4. English humor resembles the Loch Ness Monster in that both are famous but there is a strong suspicion that neither exists.

5. I asked many friends if Australian anti-intellectualism was still a living force and they all told me it was. If you are above average intelligence, hide this embarrassing fact.

6. Once you start buying first aid kits you start having accidents.

7. Rich people (in Australia) have swimming pools in their gardens but, at least, they do swim in them.

8. Australia objects to the mini-skirt not on moral but on economic grounds. Australians are no prudes and the lovely, healthy, sporty Australian girls have no reason to hide their knees and thighs. However, the mini-skirt is disastrous for the wool-trade.

9. The Art of Conversation could not die in Australia; it never lived. Television did not kill it; there was nothing there to kill.

10. Was he joking? Was he being sarcastic? Aggressive? Impertinent? Or just courteous? There was no telling from his impassive face. What a country, he thought despairingly. In Russia you always knew. If a man made a stern face he was threatening; if he was laughing uproariously, he was joking.

11. On the Continent stray cats are judged individually on their merit-some are loved, some are only respected; in England they are universally worshipped as in ancient Egypt.

12. The British are proud of their ability to create a muddle and then muddle through all difficulties. I must shake the British pride: muddle is not an exclusively British institution. Read descriptions, for instance, of the over-organized, wonderfully systematic and "thorough" German war machine during the last war.