Top 1200 British Empire Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbours, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on her account.

British people are surprised that I'm British! It's extraordinary, I get tweets every day from British people saying, 'I had no idea you were British.'

I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.

The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan.

You don't expect to get the letter saying, Her Majesty would like to appoint you Knight Commander of the British Empire! It was just a completely overwhelming and exciting day.

All comparisons between America's current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the Roman Empire.

The history of the British empire, the chapter of our national story that would have explained to my classmates why a child born in Nigeria was sat among them, was similarly missing from the curriculum.

The main motivation was to explore the empire's falling. I mean 'Duck City' is like an allegory for the Western Empire or the United States. And I was thinking what happens when it falls and declines like the Roman Empire.

What if all those strange and unexplainable bends in history were the result of supernatural interference? At which point I asked myself, what's the weirdest most eccentric historical phenomenon of them all? Answer:the Great British Empire. Clearly, one tiny little island could only conquer half the known world with supernatural aid. Those absurd Victorian manners and ridiculous fashions were obviously dictated by vampires. And, without a doubt, the British army regimental system functions on werewolf pack dynamics.

In a much larger sense, the problem of Sabah is directly influenced by the duplicity of imperial Britain. For whatever devious reason, the dismantling of the British empire created divisions and violence due to ethnic and religious differences.

Russia can be either an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both. . . . Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.

You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.

The loss of India would mark and consummate the downfall of the British Empire. That great organism would pass at a stroke out of life into history.From such a catastrophe there could be no recovery.

Russia has lost an empire but not yet found a role. Russia has to decide what it wants to be. And as we know in Britain, that takes some time. It is quite tough to lose an empire and Russia lost its empire very rapidly and very admirably, that is to say peacefully, it didn't fight.

While we remember that we are contending against brothers and fellow subjects, we must also remember that we are contending in this crisis for the fate of the British Empire.

Britain in the 19th century was two things simultaneously; the hub of the largest empire on earth and the greatest manufacturing and trading nation the world had ever seen. Yet the formal empire and the trading empire were not the same thing.

A lot of the time, the British press make me ashamed and embarrassed to be British. They give others the impression that the British are selfish, envious and bitter people, which is simply not true in my opinion. I think that British people in general are really nice and friendly.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'

I'm as addicted to 'Power' as I am 'Empire.' I'm just grateful. We get a chance to have two phenomenal shows that we can enjoy. So when 'Empire' is over, 'Power' starts. When 'Power' is over, 'Empire' starts.

By 1917, thanks to the new munitions factories and the women that worked in them, the British Empire was supplying more than 50 million shells a year.

It would be far less interesting, after 'The Empire Strikes Back,' to have an hour-long movie in between 'Empire' and 'Return of the Jedi,' where Luke is training. It's so much cooler to cut from end of 'Empire' to beginning of 'Return,' where he's become the Jedi.

British audiences are toughest on British films. So often, a British film is the last thing they want to see. If you please them, you really know you've made an impact.

I received an OBE from the Queen, which probably doesn't mean anything in America but is quite nice in England - the Order of the British Empire for services to drama.

I'm still a member of the Empire! Although I sometimes feel like an American with a British accent - you get contaminated after so long.

I feel like Ive been engaged to the British Empire since 1980 and tonight you have given me the ring knighthood.

Let's turn British inventions into British industries, British factories and British jobs. Let them make pounds for us, not dollars marks or yen for others.

If you look back at history, the various Maharajas of the Indian empire actually helped support a whole British industry. The royalty in those days ordered exotic cars in huge numbers.

In the past, Britons were scathing about the cruelties of the old Roman empire and the excesses of Catholic empire builders such as the Spanish and the French. They convinced themselves that their empire was different and benign because it rested on sea power and trade rather than on armies.

Once I spoke about this subject among a group of English intellectuals. One of them was a professor on Roman Law at one of the leading British universities. I asked him,what was the official language of the Byzantine Empire? He said, maybe sometime in the sixth or the seventh century.The Justinian Codex, the rule of law in the Byzantine Empire which was produced by Emperor Justinian, it was written in Latin.And he looked at me ,he knew that I knew already that the only original copy was found in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbor, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on her account. If we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that.

When I was in high school, I looked for the black presence in a British historical tradition - before too much slavery and empire - that would not cost me my self-respect.

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.

If the British Empire is fated to pass from life into history, we must hope it will not be by the slow process of dispersion and decay, but in some supreme exertion for freedom, for right and for truth.

The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.

I believe in the acceptance of personal responsibility, freedom of choice, and the British Empire, which took freedom and the rule of law to countries which would never have known it otherwise.

In recent times, European nations, with the use of gunpowder and other technical improvements in warfare, controlled practically the whole world. One, the British Empire, brought under one government a quarter of the earth and its inhabitants.

We thought being offered the M.B.E. [Member of the Order of the British Empire] was as funny as everybody else thought it was. Why? What for? We didn't believe it. It was a part we didn't want. We all met and agreed it was daft.

Well British pension funds have not been investing the savings of British people in British infrastructure.

If you sit down with British officers or British senior NCOs, they understand the sweep of history. They know the history of British forces not just in Afghanistan but the history of British successful counter-insurgencies - Northern Ireland, Malaysia.

Even the building of a second British empire in the 19th century never fully healed the wound of losing America, and the end of Britain's imperial prestige after the second world war has cut deeper.

The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britain's belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.

My investigations have indicated that Taib and his family have a property empire in Canada, the US and the UK. Funds have been generated by Taib selling off rainforests with some of the money going through the British Virgin Islands.

... the reason is that a military defeat of Britain will bring about the disintegration of the British Empire. This would not be of any benefit to Germany.

I guess the most surprising discovery was how long Gandhi remained loyal to the ideal of the British Empire, even in India.

The long years of fighting Napoleon's ambitions for a world empire had hardened the British into an 'us-against-them' mentality.

You know that in the Eurasian space, Russia is the central state, the most powerful state. But to become an empire, a member of some empire, a province in this empire - you know, we're probably not ready for that yet, neither in Kazakhstan nor in Belarus.

I think it's important to realise that what happens in Neo-Platonism beginning with Plotinus and Porphyry and then going on for the next several centuries, is a real kind of contest for the ideas and convictions of the intelligentsia of the later Roman Empire. So that you have Christians slowly converting more and more powerful people until of course actually Constantine and then other emperors after him, become Christian, and the empire becomes a Christian empire rather than Pagan empire.

I turned down the OBE because its not a club you want to join when you look at the villains whove got it. Its all the things I think are despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest.

We better rethink the position of the United States in the world and whether we want to be an empire. Being an empire puts all of us in jeopardy. The American Empire, while it was just wreaking havoc on other nations, didn't bother us.

Before they became Americans, most white inhabitants of the 13 colonies considered themselves British. It was predictable, therefore, that they would lust after empire, because this was exactly what their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic also did.

Ferguson argued that British involvement in World War I was unnecessary, far too costly in lives and money for any advantage gained, and a Pyrrhic victory that in many ways contributed to the end of the Empire.

Franklin Roosevelt saw the world as a possible alliance, with the UN involved, of course, where we would never have these kinds of wars again. And he was equally opposed to the British Empire as he was against the Communist Russians.

The builders of the British Indian Empire have patiently built its four pillars-the European interests, the army, the Indian princes and the communal divisions.

I've always been drawn to the Edwardian period in England. To me, it seems like such a fascinating time, when the British Empire was at the height of its powers and the strict mores of the Victorian age were dissipating into the decadence of King Edward's reign.

The pre-war empire had been sufficiently informal and sufficiently cheap for Parliament to claim authority over it without having to concern itself too much about what this authority entailed. The post-war empire necessitated a much greater investment in administrative machinery and military force. This build-up of control had to be paid for, either by British taxpayers or by their colonists.

To destroy Christianity, we must first destroy the British Empire.

Such a prostitution of judicial power can never occur again under the shadow of the British law, for no jury within the wide circle of the empire would submit to such an infraction of their privilege, even if a judge could be found daring enough to attempt it.

Canada's ruling circles seek to ally themselves more closely with American imperialism without giving up the economic advantages of membership in the British Empire.

Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel.