Scorn Read online

No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute.

  Paul Gallico

  Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.

  John Updike

  The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide open spaces surrounded by teeth.

  Charles Luckman

  America is just a big version of [the] Westfield [shopping centre] but with witty people around the edges and a desert in the middle.

  Kevin Maher

  America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.

  Arnold Toynbee

  Americans are people who laugh at African witch doctors and spend 100 million dollars on fake reducing systems.

  L.L. Levinson

  As always the British shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.

  Alistair Cooke

  There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

  G.K. Chesterton

  The Americans often appease their enemies, but they always betray their friends.

  Anonymous Middle East Ruler

  What you do to your enemies today, you will do to your friends tomorrow.

  Afghan proverb

  The average American is just like a child.

  Richard Nixon

  Walking is uniquely un-American.

  Bill Bryson

  What America calls ‘globalisation’ the rest of the world call ‘Americanisation’.

  Henry Louis Gates Jnr

  Knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to this country.

  George III on America

  Not so much an axis of evil, more an arc of insufferability.

  US pundit describing America’s European allies

  Paralytic sycophants, effete betrayers of humanity, carrioneating servile imitators, arch-cowards and collaborators, gang of women-murderers, degenerate rabble, parasitic traditionalists, playboy soldiers, conceited dandies.

  Approved terms of abuse in 1953 for East German Communist speakers when describing Britain

  The Earth contains no race of human beings so totally vile and worthless as the Welsh.

  Walter Savage Landor, letter to Robert Southey

  ‘The Welsh,’ said the Doctor, ‘are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing,’ he said with disgust, ‘sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.’

  Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

  Last Sunday I came – a man whom the Lord God made – to the town of Flint, with its great double walls and rounded bastions: may I see it all aflame! An obscure English wedding was there, with but little mead – an English feast! And I meant to earn a shilling solid reward for my harper’s art. So I began with ready speed, to sing an ode to the kinsmen; but all I got was mockery, spurning of my song, and grief.

  Lewis Glyn Cothi or Tudur Penllyn, tr. from the Welsh by Kenneth Jackson, The English Wedding

  But Lord! to see the absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange.

  Samuel Pepys, Diary

  A Welshman is a man who prays on his knees on Sunday and preys on his friends the rest of the week.

  Insult, probably of English origin

  The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.

  Dylan Thomas on Wales

  There are still parts of Wales where the only concession to gaiety is a striped shroud.

  Gwyn Thomas

  The Welsh are so damn Welsh that it looks like affectation.

  Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh to D.B. Wyndham Lewis

  The relationship between the Welsh and the English is based on trust and understanding. They don’t trust us and we don’t understand them.

  Dudley Wood

  Fucking Welsh.

  Tony Blair, reported by his press secretary Alastair Campbell

  Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.

  Brendan Behan

  Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.

  George Bernard Shaw

  I return your seasonal greeting card with contempt. May your hypocritical words choke you and may they choke you early in the New Year, rather than later.

  Professor Kennedy Lindsay, a Vanguard member of the Northern Assembly, returning a Christmas card from the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dr Garret FitzGerald, in the Irish Times

  Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

  James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

  An Irish queer is a fellow who prefers women to drink.

  Sean O’Faolain

  I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.

  Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Attrib.

  An ass in Germany is a professor in Rome.

  German Song

  Life is never so bad that Germany is better.

  Jeremy Clarkson

  German humour is no laughing matter.

  Mark Twain

  I like Germany so much, I think there should be two of them.

  François Mauriac on German reunification

  Ah, so next time we shall not be able to hear them coming.

  Pierre Mendès-France, former French Prime Minister, on news that German soldiers’ jackboots were now fitted with rubber soles, 1960

  Germany is too big for Europe, too small for the world.

  Henry Kissinger

  To the small extent that it still exhibits a smiling countenance it is, as Hofmannsthal said, because it no longer has any muscles in its face. There has indeed always been something feminine about Vienna, perhaps because of the strong Slav elements in its population, and the combination of aimlessness and femininity has unfortunate results. It makes it a sad and rather mean town. The people seem to lack charity towards each other. They rather enjoy denouncing each other for minor breaches of the regulations. They give vent to explosions of rage when inconvenienced in small ways. They cling to what they think of as their old traditions, treacly and anaemic though these were for the most part. The dowdy clothes, the grim municipal tenement buildings and the general grubbiness make Vienna at certain times of the year look more like an Iron-Curtain town than one which belongs to the West. Indeed the inhabitants of Prague and of Budapest seem to me to walk with a jauntier step than do the Viennese. There is certainly no more depressing sight than that of the self-conscious crowds of businessmen and their ladies at the famous opera ball, supposedly the glittering climax of a brilliant carnival season. Austria has the highest published suicide-rate of any country in the world and Vienna makes a disproportionate contribution to this record.

  Sir Anthony Rumbold, British ambassador to Austria, on Vienna

  The devil take these people and their language! They take a dozen monosyllabic words in their jaws, chew them, crunch them and spit them out again, and call that speaking. Fortunately they are by nature fairly silent, and although they gaze at us open-mouthed, they spare us long conversations.

  Heinrich Heine on the English

  German is a language which was developed solely to afford the speaker the opportunity to spit at strangers under the guise of polite conversation.

  National Lampoon

  Unmitigated noodles.

  Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany on the English

  One thing I will say for the Germans, they are always perfectly willing to give somebody else’s land to somebody else.

  Will Rogers

  The English are, in my opinion, perfidious and cunning, plotting the destruction of the lives of foreigners, so that even if
they humbly bend the knee, they cannot be trusted.

  Leo de Rozmital, 1456

  I have the feeling this is all going to end very badly.

  General Charles de Gaulle, to an aide, on first seeing California

  The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

  Mary McCarthy, American novelist

  We are terribly afraid that some Americans spit on the floor, even when that floor is covered by good carpets. Now all claims to civilisation are suspended till this secretion is otherwise disposed of. No English gentleman has spit upon the floor since the Heptarchy.

  Sydney Smith

  An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.

  Alan Jay Lerner, My Fair Lady

  Oh, if the Queen were a man, she would like to go and give those horrid Russians whose word one cannot trust such a beating.

  Queen Victoria, letter to Disraeli

  The English take their pleasures sadly, after the fashion of their country.

  Maximilien de Béthune, Duc de Sully

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

  George Mikes

  The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

  Paul Theroux

  The French have made of ingratitude – as of most things in life – an art.

  Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post

  The English are the people of consummate cant.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

  Pakistan has many of the characteristics of mid-Victorian England – few, unfortunately, of the better ones.

  John Bushell, British Ambassador to Pakistan

  The departure of the Wise men from the East seems to have been on a more extensive scale than is generally supposed, for no one of that description seems to have been left behind.

  Sydney Smith on the East

  The only good that comes from the east is the sun.

  Portuguese saying

  I must confess that hitherto I had never been able to take the Lebanese entirely seriously. Poised uneasily between Europe and the Orient, Christianity and Islam, the country, for all its beauty, seemed not really to belong anywhere. It appeared to be inhabited by a kind of quintessential wog with a rich patina of French chic, ready to trade with anyone in any commodity at his own price, existing in a kind of perpetual Nescafé society, hoping that the problems of the real world would somehow disappear if not looked at too closely, and concentrating on the sensible occupation of making money.

  Sir Paul Wright, British Ambassador to Lebanon

  In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

  Orson Welles, The Third Man

  Since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.

  Alan Coren on Switzerland

  Oats. A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

  Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language

  It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

  P.G. Wodehouse

  Norway, too, has noble wild prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England.

  Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

  Of course I want political autonomy but not cultural autonomy. You just have to watch the Scottish Baftas to want to kill yourself.

  Muriel Gray

  I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obligated to desist from the experiment in despair.

  Charles Lamb

  His sayings are generally like women’s letters; all the pith is in the postscript.

  William Hazlitt on Charles Lamb

  The Scotchman is one who keeps the Sabbath and every other thing he can lay his hands on.

  Lyndon Johnson

  It raises the average IQ of both countries.

  Robert Muldoon, Prime Minister of New Zealand, commenting on an exodus of New Zealanders emigrating to Australia

  Acquaintances seemed to steer slap through his consciousness and were gone with the wind.

  D.H. Lawrence comparing the Australian mind with the Flying Dutchman

  Pass a law to give every single whingeing bloody Pommie his fare home to England. Back to the smoke and the sun shining ten days a year and shit in the streets. Yer can have it.

  Thomas Keneally, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

  I find it hard to say, because when I was there it seemed to be shut.

  Clement Freud on being asked his opinion of New Zealand

  You must remember that the Australian voter has a short memory span … less than fourteen days in most cases.

  John Howard, Australian Prime Minister

  Frustrate a Frenchman, he will drink himself to death; an Irishman, he will die of angry hypertension; a Dane, he will shoot himself; an American, he will get drunk, shoot you, then establish a million dollar aid programme for your relatives. Then he will die of an ulcer.

  Stanley Rudin

  American intellectuals became afraid to collect their thoughts lest they be accused of unlawful assembly.

  Historian Charles Beard on McCarthyite hysteria in America

  The English approach to ideas is not to kill them but to let them die of neglect.

  Jeremy Paxman

  England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

  George Orwell

  The English think of an opinion as something which a decent person, if he has the misfortune to have one, does all he can to hide.

  Margaret Halsey, American writer

  Canada is useful only to provide me with furs.

  Madame de Pompadour after the fall of Quebec

  The gloomy region, where the year is divided into one day and one night, lies entirely outside the stream of history.

  W.W. Reade on Canada, 1872

  Canada is a country built against any common, geographical, historic or cultural sense.

  Pierre Trudeau, Canadian Prime Minister

  I don’t even know what street Canada is on.

  Al Capone

  A country the size of a piece of snot.

  Chen Tan-Sun, Taiwanese Foreign Minister, on Singapore

  In China, when you’re one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.

  Bill Gates

  The general level of intelligence of the Thais is rather low, a good deal lower than ours and much lower than that of the Chinese.

  Sir Anthony Rumbold, British ambassador to Thailand

  Decayed garbage left for months on the side of the roads; stagnant canals that serve both as cesspools and as the dumping ground for dead dogs; buses and lorries that belch uncontrolled clouds of diesel fumes; scarcely a pavement without potholes and open manholes to break the legs of the unwary; bag-snatchers in every block; assault and violence a way of life; prostitution and every form of natural and unnatural vice on a scale astonishing even in Asia; a city of 4 million with only one park, and that littered with refuse and infested with thieves; unplanned hideous ribbon development; no proper drainage, so that in the rainy season large areas of the city remain flooded for weeks on end; and the whole set in a flat mournful plain without even a hillock in sight for a 100 miles in any direction: this is Bangkok, the vaunted Venice of the East.

  Sir Arthur de la Mare, British Ambassador to Tha
iland

  God made serpents and rabbits and Armenians.

  Turkish insult

  Do not trust a Hungarian unless he has a third eye in his forehead.

  Czech insult

  Half an Italian is one too many in a house.

  German and French insult

  I saw the new Italian navy. Its boats have glass bottoms so they can see the old Italian navy.

  Peter Secchia, President Bush’s nominee for US Ambassador to Italy, during Senate confirmation hearings, 1989

  In Milan traffic lights are instructions. In Rome they are suggestions. In Naples they are Christmas decorations.

  Italian Defence Minister, Antonio Martino

  Apart from cheese and tulips, the main product of Holland is advocaat, a drink made from lawyers.

  Alan Coren, The Sanity Inspector

  The indigested vomit of the sea

  Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.

  Andrew Marvell, ‘The Character of Holland’

  There are few virtues which the Poles do not possess and there are few errors they have ever avoided.

  Winston Churchill

  Did hogs feast or did Lithuanians have a feast here?

  Polish saying

  Beer is the Danish national drink and the Danish national weakness is another beer.

  Clementine Paddleford

  Fuck off, Norway.

  Paul Gascoigne, when asked by live Norwegian television if he had a message for the Norwegian people before the England-Norway World Cup qualifier

  It could plausibly be argued that it is a misfortune for anybody but a Finn to spend three years in Finland, as I have just done. Even the Finns who can afford it are happy to make frequent escapes to sunnier climes. Finland is flat, freezing, and far from the pulsating centres of European life. Nature has done little for her and art not much more. Until yesterday the country was inhabited only by peasants, foresters, fishermen and a small class of alien rulers who spent most of their money elsewhere. The rich cultural past of Europe has left fewer traces in Finland in the shape of public and private buildings of quality and the objects of art which adorn them than anywhere else in the Western world save perhaps Iceland. Finnish cooking deserves a sentence to itself for its crude horror; only the mushrooms and the crayfish merit attention.

  Sir Bernard Ledwidge, British Ambassador to Finland

  How do you tell the difference between a Finnish introvert and a Finnish extrovert? One looks at his own feet when he’s talking to you, the other will look at yours.