Top 60 George Mikes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Many Continentals think life is a game; the English think cricket is a game.”

— George Mikes

2. “On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners.”

— George Mikes

3. “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 labor bore fruit.”

— George Mikes

4. “Once you start buying first aid kits you start having accidents.”

— George Mikes

5. “When people say England, they sometimes mean Great Britain, sometimes the United Kingdom, sometimes the British Isles, – but never England.”

— George Mikes

6. “The man who is not afraid of danger is not a hero, but a psychopath.”

— George Mikes

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

— George Mikes

8. “The English have no soul; they have the understatement instead.”

— George Mikes

9. “A criminal may improve and become a decent member of society. A foreigner cannot improve. Once a foreigner, always a foreigner. There is no way out for him.”

— George Mikes

10. “On the Continent there is one topic which should be avoided-the weather; in England, if you do not repeat the phrase “Lovely day, isn’t it?” at least two hundred times a day, you are considered a bit dull.”

— George Mikes

11. “In England it is bad manners to be clever, to assert something confidently. It may be your own personal view that two and two make four, but you must not state it in a self-assured way, because this is a democratic country and others may be of a different opinion.”

— George Mikes

12. “When I am alone in the forest at night-time and jump from one tree to another, I often think that life is so strange.”

— George Mikes

13. “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.”

— George Mikes

14. “Jokes are better than war. Even the most aggressive jokes are better than the least aggressive wars. Even the longest jokes are better than the shortest wars.”

— George Mikes

15. “Bad English was the second language of Israel and bad Hebrew, of course, remained the national language.”

— George Mikes

16. “The English take everything with an exquisite sense of humour. They are only offended if you tell them that they have no sense of humour.”

— George Mikes

17. “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

18. “It is often said that the Japanese are extremely clean at home, or inside any house or office, but dirty and untidy outside. ‘Go and look at a railway station,’ I was told, ‘and you’ll be horrified.’ I went and was horrified; horrified by the cleanliness of the place.”

— George Mikes

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

— George Mikes

20. “Foreigners have souls; the English haven’t.”

— George Mikes

21. “Bargaining is a repulsive habit; compromise is one of the highest human virtues – the difference between the two being that the first is practised on the Continent, the latter in Great Britain.”

— George Mikes

22. “American radio is the reverse of the Shakespearean stage. In Shakespeare’s time the world’s greatest dramas were acted with the most primitive technical arrangements; on the American air the world’s most primitive writing is performed under perfect technical conditions.”

— George Mikes

23. “An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.”

— George Mikes

24. “You can keep a dog: but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals.”

— George Mikes

25. “THE British are brave people. They can face anything, except reality.”

— George Mikes

26. “People on the Continent either tell you the truth or lie; in England they hardly ever lie, but they would not dream of telling you the truth.”

— George Mikes

27. “A dog will flatter you but you have to flatter the cat.”

— George Mikes

28. “To be extravagant you need money. True. But you do not need your own money.”

— George Mikes

29. “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

30. “A foreign observer is struck by our gentleness: by the orderly behaviour of the English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling, the willingness to form queues.”

— George Mikes

31. “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

32. “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

33. “In the field of snobbery, Australia is an underdeveloped country; even a few British ex-colonies, regarded as under developed in all other respects, could export a great deal of snobbery to Australia and still have enough to spare for their own, internal needs.”

— George Mikes

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

— George Mikes

35. “Tel-Aviv airport is still the only airport in the world where each passenger is met by ten relatives.”

— George Mikes

36. “The Japanese are human beings like the rest of us, but they will strongly resent this insinuation.”

— George Mikes

37. “I have often thought that the aim of port is to give you a good and durable hangover, so that during the next day you should be reminded of the splendid occasion the night before.”

— George Mikes

38. “There are many non-intellectual countries; Australia is one of the few anti-intellectual ones.”

— George Mikes

39. “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.”

— George Mikes

40. “A couple from Sydney or Melbourne might leave on the same day for their holiday: the wife might go sun-bathing at Surfers Paradise, in Queensland, the husband ski-ing in the Snowy Mountains. A lucky country.”

— George Mikes

41. “It is great fun dying in the United States of America. It is great fun first of all for the undertakers who make a wonderful living out of it but also for the deceased who suddenly becomes the centre of attention and fuss.”

— George Mikes

42. “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

43. “I said in my earlier book, and find no reason for retracting my statement, that the famous Jewish sense of humour got lost in transit to Israel.”

— George Mikes

44. “There is nothing personal in the fact that they ignore you: they are simply Miltonists. All English shop assistants are Miltonists. A Miltonist firmly believes that ’they also serve who only stand and wait.”

— George Mikes

45. “Humility is one of the most repulsive virtues, nearly always false.”

— George Mikes

46. “If it is gay, ribald and lascivious night-life you are after, Israel is not the place for you. The night clubs you do find are nearer in spirit to a YMCA than to dens of iniquity.”

— George Mikes

47. “Prices in Italy are only slightly lower than in France, which means that Italy is a very expensive country for everyone, natives, visitors and tourists.”

— George Mikes

48. “The English are always ready to admire anything so long as they can queue up.”

— George Mikes

49. “When a wicked and unworthy subject annoyed the Sultan of Turkey or the Czar of Russia, he had his head cut of without much ceremony; but when the same happened in England, the monarch declared : “We are not amused”.”

— George Mikes

50. “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