Life & Wisdom Quote by George Mikes

British superiority gets its sharpest skewering when it’s delivered in the calm tone of someone stating the obvious. George Mikes builds this line like a tidy little theorem: two groups, one tiny and one vast, then the punchline - “The latter group does not really count.” The joke isn’t just that the math is grotesque. It’s that the logic is familiar. Mikes is parodying an imperial reflex so ingrained it can survive the collapse of the empire itself, lingering as a social attitude: the world arranged around England, everyone else demoted to background noise.

The specific intent is satirical exposure. By exaggerating the division into “the English and the foreigners,” he mocks a national habit of treating Englishness not as a nationality but as a default setting, while “foreigner” becomes a single undifferentiated category - a rhetorical bin for nearly all humanity. The sterile precision of the population numbers adds bite: bureaucracy and self-importance dressed up as statistics, as if domination can be justified by a ledger.

Subtextually, Mikes is also writing as an outsider who knows the system from the inside. His humor carries the sting of lived experience: the immigrant’s eye for the small humiliations that masquerade as tradition or common sense. The line comes from mid-20th-century Britain, when global power was slipping but cultural hierarchy stayed stubborn. That’s why it works: it catches a nation in the act of believing its own mythology, and lets the absurdity condemn itself.