58 Empire Quotes

We can safely make one prophecy: whatever the outcome of this war, the British Empire is at an end. It has been mortally wounded. The future of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis in their cursed island. (4th February 1945)

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused - preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.

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.

Britain is the only colony in the British Empire and it is up to us now to liberate ourselves.

Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He began as a small clerk, and he has never stopped being a clerk. Stalin owes nothing to rhetoric. He governs from his office, thanks to a bureaucracy that obeys his every nod and gesture. It's striking that Russian propaganda, in the criticisms it makes of us, always holds itself within certain limits. Stalin, that cunning Caucasian, is apparently quite ready to abandon European Russia, if he thinks that a failure to solve her problems would cause him to lose everything. Let nobody think Stalin might reconquer Europe from the Urals! It is as if I were installed in Slovakia, and could set out from there to reconquer the Reich. This is the catastrophe that will cause the loss of the Soviet Empire.

See that little stream, we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a whole month to walk to it, a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.

It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine. (p. 35)

The true key to the declension of the Roman empire - which is not to be found in all Gibbon's immense work - may be stated in two words: - the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.

'Basic truth about the colonies, Heaslop. Any time there's trouble, you can put it down to books. Too many of the wrong ideas getting into the heads of the wrong sorts of people. If ever the Empire comes to ruin, Heaslop, mark my words, the British publisher will be to blame.' [16]

Commerce is so far from being beneficial to Arts or to Empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their History shows, for the above Reason of Individual Merit being its Great Hatred. Empires flourish till they become Commercial & then they are scattered abroad to the four winds

The Foundation of Empire is Art & Science Remove them or Degrade them & the Empire is No More-Empire follows Art & Not Vice Versa as Englishmen suppose.

The Empire supposes a negation and a certainty: the certainty of the infinite malleability of man and the negation of human nature.

Deny them [the colonies] this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond, which originally made, and must still preserve the unity of the empire.

By adverting to the dignity of this high calling our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire: and have made the most extensive, and the only honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race.

Navy Commander Erich Raeder was more concerned with enhancing the navy's position in the new Reich than with contributing to a rational grand strategy. His limited vision fitted nicely into Hitler's dreams of world empire.

That is the great end of empires before God, to be Catholic and draw nations into their Catholicism. But our empire is less and less Christian as it grows.

There is no merit in an empire as such. Extension in space does not necessarily mean spiritual advancement. The small community is easier to govern, and, it may well be, more pleasant to live in. If its opportunities are limited its perils are also circumscribed. But the alternatives which confronted him were empire or anarchy.

The Athenian empire lasted for fifty years at the most, and the stupendous creation of Alexander the Great for less. What has been the fate of succeeding imperialisms? That of Spain endured on the grand scale for little more than a century; that of Napoleon for a decade; the British Empire is less than two centuries old, and in its present form is a thing of yesterday. In the brief span of recorded history empires have had a shorter life than many monarchies, theocracies, and even republics. The Augustan alone reached a venerable age. In the coming of Christianity it had to face the greatest of all historic convulsions, but such was its potency that it weathered the storm and influenced profoundly the organization of the Christian church.

The true achievement of Augustus is that he saved the world from disintegration. Without him Rome must have lost her conquests one by one, and seen them relapse into barbarism or degenerate into petty satrapies. The wild peoples of the East and North would have ante-dated their invasions by centuries.

How did we ever get to be an empire? The writings of Noam Chomsky -- America's most useful citizen, in my opinion -- are the best answer to that question. --Boston Globe, April 25, 2004 [190]

Chomsky says America is a warring country seeking to build an empire, not a liberator trying to achieve peace, freedom, and democracy. --Debbie Schlussel, February 21, 2006 [254]

He was a practical mystic, the most formidable and terrible of all combinations, uniting an aspiration derived from the celestial and supernatural with the energy of a mighty man of action; a great captain, but off the field seeming, like a thunderbolt, the agent of greater forces than himself ; no hypocrite, but a defender of the faith; the raiser and maintainer of the Empire of England.

One of the lessons of recent and distant history is that all empires and bearers of the coffin of evil, whenever they mobilized their evil against the Arab nation, or against the Muslim world, they were themselves buried in their own coffin, with their sick dreams and their arrogance and greed, under Arab and Islamic soil; or they returned to die on the land from which they had proceeded to perpetrate aggression. This has been the case with all empires preceeding our present time.

Ce corps qui s'appelait et qui s'appelle encore le saint empire romain n'etait en aucune maniere ni saint, ni romain, ni empire.

You should avoid needless and entangling engagements. You may boast about them, you may brag about them, you may say you are procuring consideration of the country. You may say that an Englishman may now hold up his head among the nations. But what does all this come to, gentlemen? It comes to this, that you are increasing your engagements without increasing your strength; and if you increase your engagements without increasing strength, you diminish strength, you abolish strength; you really reduce the empire and do not increase it. You render it less capable of performing its duties; you render it an inheritance less precious to hand on to future generations.

It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer of the type well-known in the East, now posing as a fakir, striding half naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.

The British Empire is the greatest stimulant of organised freedom which the world has ever known. By geography, by experience, by practical idealism, by political maturity, by character, the British have a part to play which no other race could do so well.

If his 'magna imago' could return to earth, he would be puzzled at some of our experiments in empire, and might well complain that the imperfections of his work were taken as its virtues, and that so many truths had gone silently out of mind. He had prided himself on having given the world peace, and he would be amazed by the loud praise of war as a natural and wholesome concomitant of a nation's life. Wars he had fought from an anxious desire to safeguard his people, as the shepherd builds the defences of his sheepfold; but he hated the thing, because he knew well the deadly 'disordering,' which the Greek historian noted as the consequence of the most triumphant campaign. He would marvel, too, at the current talk of racial purity, the exaltation of one breed of men as the chosen favourites of the gods. That would seem to him not only a defiance of the new Christian creed, but of the Stoicism which he had sincerely professed.

It has been said that the people of this country are deeply interested in the humanitarian and philanthropic considerations involved in [the Eastern Question]. All must appreciate such feelings. But I am mistaken if there be not a yet deeper sentiment on the part of the people of this country, one with which I cannot doubt your lordships will ever sympathise, and that is-the determination to maintain the Empire of England.

I came to serve you at the age of 28 and now I have not a hair on me that is not white, and my body is infirm and exhausted. All that was left to me and my brothers has been taken away and sold, even to the cloak that I wore, without hearing or trial, to my great dishonor.

After the war, there was this feeling of no empire no longer : 'All right, come on, Europe, give these countries back. Britain?' 'What?' 'What's that behind your back?' 'Oh, it's India and a number of other countries.' 'Give them back.' 'Oh, all right. This one goes here and that one there. Oh, we need the Falkland Islands : for strategic sheep purposes.'

There rise her timeless capitals of Empires daily born, Whose plinths are laid at midnight, and whose streets are packed at morn; And here come hired youths and maids that feign to love or sin In tones like rusty razor-blades to tunes like smitten tin.

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: 'A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.'

'E's a sort of a bloomin' cosmopolouse - soldier an' sailor too.

In my realm, the sun never sets. (Nunca se ponia el sol)

There are men in the House of Commons who profess in a special sense to be the representatives of labour, who would not allow me, who represented a great working class constituency...the claim to represent you. In order to do that, according to their theories, I should have to be a man who did some work thirty years ago, and never did any after...it is these men who are at this time blackening the character of those who are upholding the British dominions and the British flag throughout the world...They have no word of sympathy for the men who suffer for the Imperial cause...But one thing I will say, and I say it in your name: these men do not represent the working classes of England, and never yet in our history of the British race, has the great democracy been unpatriotic.

The Empire Never Ended