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In England only uneducated people show off their knowledge nobody quotes Latin or Greek authors in the course of conversation, unless he has never read them.

George Mikes

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George Mikes
Age: 75 †
Born: 1912
Born: February 15
Died: 1987
Died: August 30
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England
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More quotes by George Mikes

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Continental people have a sex life the English have hot-water bottles.
George Mikes
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Bad English was the second language of Israel and bad Hebrew, of course, remained the national language.
George Mikes
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Television is of great educational value. It teaches you while still young how to (a) kill, (b) rob, (c) embezzle, (d) shoot, (e) poison, and, generally speaking, (f) how to grow up into a Wild West outlaw or gangster by the time you leave school.
George Mikes
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In Moscow they do not pay much attention to the living but keep their cemeteries in a splendid state.
George Mikes
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Israel also deprived the world of its chance of shedding tears of genuine sympathy over her destruction. The world resents this it likes to feel noble and sympathetic.
George Mikes
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To be extravagant you need money. True. But you do not need your own money.
George Mikes
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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.
George Mikes
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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.
George Mikes
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THE British are brave people. They can face anything, except reality.
George Mikes
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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.
George Mikes
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The Japanese are human beings like the rest of us, but they will strongly resent this insinuation.
George Mikes
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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.
George Mikes
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You can keep a dog: but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals.
George Mikes
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In England the boy pats his adored one on the back and says softly, I don't object, you know. If he is quite mad with passion, he may add: I rather fancy you, in fact.
George Mikes
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Japan is, you often feel, an improved version of the United States.
George Mikes
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Long before the word Zionism was uttered for the first time, old religious Jews came from all over the world to die in Jerusalem. It is the finest place to die in - it has always been acknowledged. It has a joie de mourir quite its own.
George Mikes
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The country has always been governed by a coalition but today it is governed by a so-called Grand Coalition which is a more polite word for all and sundry.
George Mikes
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'I don't say a Zionist must be insane,' said President Weizmann, 'but it helps if he is.'
George Mikes
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Once you start buying first aid kits you start having accidents.
George Mikes
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It was decided almost two hundred years ago that English should be the language spoken in the United States. It is not known, however, why this decision has not been carried out.
George Mikes