“The tone in which an Englishman expresses anger would, in Italy, be only a mark of surprise.”

"The Country or the City?," http://books.google.com/books?id=czgZAAAAMAAJ&q=%22The+expression+as+right+as+rain+must+have+been+invented+by+an+Englishman%22&pg=PA121#v=onepage North American Review ( February 1931 http://www.archive.org/stream/northamreview231miscrich#page/120/mode/2up)

Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

I.303 http://books.google.com/books?id=Nl-vaAdJD3MC&q="we+often+contradict+an+opinion+for+no+other+reason+than+that+we+do+not+like+the+tone+in+which+it+is+expressed"&pg=PA137#v=onepage
Human, All Too Human (1878)

Radio Talk. BBC Radio 4 (2 August 1978)

As quoted in Debussy (1989) by Paul Holmes, p. 36
Context: Music would take over at the point at which words become powerless, with the one and only object of expressing that which nothing but music could express. For this, I need a text by a poet who, resorting to discreet suggestion rather than full statement, will enable me to graft my dream upon his dream — who will give me plain human beings in a setting belonging to no particular period or country. … Then I do not wish my music to drown the words, nor to delay the course of the action. I want no purely musical developments which are not called for inevitably by the text. In opera there is always too much singing. Music should be as swift and mobile as the words themselves.

Source: Dangerous Angels

Comme on craint peu de choquer la vanité, on arrive fort vite en Italie au ton de l'intimité, et à dire des choses personnelles.
Source: La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839), Ch. 6