Quotes About The British Empire

#1. 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.

Doris Lessing

#2. 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.

Winston S. Churchill

#3. It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind.

Winston Churchill

#4. 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.

John Lennon

#5. The British seizure of Hongkong was an aspect of one of the most ugly crimes of the British Empire: the takeover and destruction of India, and the use of India to flood China with opium.

Robert Trout

#6. It is fundamental to socialism that we should liquidate the British Empire as soon as we can

Stafford Cripps

#7. I, the British Empire began as a primarily economic phenomenon, its growth powered by commerce and consumerism. The demand for sugar drew merchants tot he carribean. British were not the first Empire builders. They were IMERIAL IMMITATORS!

Niall Ferguson

#8. I'm for fighting a war on terrorism, not a war in Southwest Asia that Alexander the Great couldn't win, the British Empire couldn't win, the Soviet Union couldn't win. That's stupid. It's a waste of resources; a waste of America's best and brightest.

Kurt Schrader

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

Karl Marx

#10. Commanders and senior officers should die with troops. The honour of the British Empire and the British Army is at stake.

Lord Randolph Churchill

#11. You know your country has a checkered past when you find yourself sitting around pondering the humanitarian upside of sticking with the British Empire.

Sarah Vowell

#12. Canada evolved within the British Empire: it inherited the Parliamentary system, the Cabinet system and all the other features of the British constitutional system which had been in place, for the most part, for several centuries before Canada was even thought of.

Stockwell Day

#13. I don't drink tea. I hate it. It's mud. Moreover it's one of the main reasons for the downfall of the British Empire. Be a good girl and make me some coffee.

Ian Fleming

#14. His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.

Idi Amin

#15. If we don't stop behaving like the British Empire, we will end up like the British Empire.

Pat Buchanan

#16. It is interesting to note that most kings, queens or princes/princesses of the British Empire and Europe were born either on a new moon day or a full moon day! That includes Queen Victoria and even the current Prince William and his consort Kate Middleton.

Greenstone Lobo

#17. 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.

Kevin Kwan

#18. The British Empire now stood at the very apex of modern civilization, and that it was the special burden of this empire to spread its enlightenment - whether through commerce, the Bible, the gun, or some combination of all three - to the world's less fortunate cultures and races.

Scott Anderson

#19. People fail you, children disappoint you, thieves break in, moths corrupt, but an Order of the British Empire goes on for ever.

Fay Weldon

#20. I shall endeavor to marshal British opinion against a course of action which would bring in my opinion the greatest evils upon the people of India, upon the people of Great Britain and upon the British Empire itself.

Winston Churchill

#21. The Jews might become the dynamite that will blow up the British Empire.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky

#22. The sun never sets on the British Empire. But it rises every morning. The sky must get awfully crowded.

Steven Wright

#23. 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.

Franz Halder

#24. In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.

Graham Greene

#25. At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.

Salman Rushdie

#26. It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind.

Henry David Thoreau

#27. 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.

John Burgoyne

#28. I've lived through Hitler, Stalin, the Cold War, the British Empire, segregation, apartheid, God knows what. The world will survive this, and with just a tiny bit of luck so will everyone you love.

Kamila Shamsie

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

Nick Hornby

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

Tony Benn

#31. How could the Rice Ring go on skinning the unfortunate peasant if it hadn't the Government behind it? The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English - or rather to gangs of Jews and Scotchmen.

George Orwell

#32. Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?

Peter Greenaway

#33. I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

Winston Churchill

#34. Godrot opium, he thought. But he knew that his life was inexorably tied to opium - and that without it neither The Noble House nor the British Empire could exist.

James Clavell

#35. The fate of the Celt in the British Empire bids fair to resemble that of the Greeks among the Romans.

Joseph Jacobs

#36. When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.

Doris Lessing

#37. There is not in the British empire a man who more cordially loves a union with Great Britain than I do. But by the God that made me, I will cease to exist before I yield to a connection on such terms as the British Parliament propose.

Thomas Jefferson

#38. 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.

Winston Churchill

#39. I don't care if Margot is a Dame of the British Empire or older than myself. For me she represents eternal youth; there is an absolute musical quality in her beautiful body and phrasing. Because we are sincere and gifted, an intense abstract love is born between us every time we dance together.

Rudolf Nureyev

#40. Can't' will be the epitaph of the British Empire - unless we wake up in time.

Oswald Mosley

#41. Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.

Nick Harkaway

#42. 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.

Antony Sher

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

Arthur L. Herman

#44. [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.

Tim Buck

#45. The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads ... the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the air age we were powerful because we had airplaines. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space.

Lyndon B. Johnson

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

Steven Spielberg

#47. 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. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.

Doris Lessing

#48. 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.

Joan Collins

#49. 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.

Saul David

#50. Neither does the British Empire for which Churchill fought with all his heart. And no one believes what they read in the newspapers any more.

Michael Dobbs

#51. Teaching the history of the British Empire links in with that of the world: for better and for worse, the Empire made us what we are, forming our national identity. A country that does not understand its own history is unlikely to respect that of others.

Antony Beevor

#52. The first condition of success for the League of Nations is, therefore, a firm understanding between the British Empire and the United States of America and France and Italy that there will be no competitive building up of fleets or armies between them.

Arthur Henderson

#53. I am now a commander of the British Empire.

Kevin Spacey

#54. The British Empire has advanced to a new conception of autonomyand freedom, to the idea of a system of British nations, each freely ordering its own individual life, but bound together in unity byallegiance to one Crown, and co-operating in all that concerns the common weal.

George VI

#55. A case could be made, in fact, that the English were the first victims of the British empire: without their conquest, that empire could not have been built.

Paul Kingsnorth

#56. Gandhi was important for another reason as well: his country was suffering under the British Empire, and yet he was leading a very singular kind of resistance to it. At the time he was speaking about the violence in Europe, his followers were in jail as prisoners of the British government.

Nicholson Baker

#57. Were you to read the British press today, you would learn that the British Empire never forgets its defeats.

Robert Trout

#58. I just would like to keep going. If I kept getting the kind of work that I've been getting for the last 20 years for the next 20, I'd be a bloody Dame of the British Empire. I'd be so happy.

Anne-Marie Duff

#59. I am leading a war against the British Empire. I'm not worried about what Democratic Party hacks say or do.

Kesha

#60. Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge," Aomame said.
"Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire's budget deficits. It has no moral significance.

Haruki Murakami

#61. It was on this day that the Bahamas declared independence. Before that they were a British colony. The British Empire lost Canada and the Bahamas, to name just a couple. Britain's been dumped more times than Taylor Swift. But did they go writing whining songs about it? No.

Craig Ferguson

#62. No, men and women of the Irish race, we shall not fight for England. We shall fight for the destruction of the British Empire and the construction of an Irish republic.

James Larkin

#63. 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.

Margaret Thatcher

#64. One Bagatelle, and I'll raise you a novel," Megan had tweeted back.
"Writing for tea? Now that would have been a solution for the British empire," Laura returned.
"Writing for me," Megan had typed.
"I'll write you a tea fortune."
"No deal. I want a novel. September sounds good.

L.L. Barkat

#65. 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.

John Boyd Orr

#66. 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.

Ayn Rand

#67. Why should we not form a secret society with but one object, the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for making the Anglo Saxon race but one Empire? What a dream, but yet it is probable; it is possible.

Cecil Rhodes

#68. 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.

Lord Randolph Churchill

#69. 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.

F. Sionil Jose

#70. One touch of regret- not the canny substitute but the true regret from the heart- would have made him a different man, and the British Empire a different institution.

E. M. Forster

#71. 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.

Pankaj Mishra

#72. But a show of force by the mightiest nation on earth isn't going to do anything except convince them that their attitudes are worth holding on to. Soon they'll be martyrs and world opinion will think the British Empire nothing but a big bully too fond of waving the big stick.

Susan Howatch

#73. 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)

Adolf Hitler

#74. 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.

Ken Loach

#75. I don't have doctrinaire views about how we should relate to Asia. But novelists reflect the world they live in, and that world propels you, to some extent. I'm a creature of the British Empire, and of the period of transition from the Empire.

Christopher Koch

#76. ... instead of trying to grapple with the implications of the story of empire, the British seem to have decided just to ignore it... the most corrosive part of this amnesia is a sense that because the nation is not what it was, it can never be anything again.

Jeremy Paxman

#77. Not only the priceless heritage of our fathers, of our seamen, of our Empire builders is being thrown away in a war that serves no British interests - but our alliance leader Stalin dreams of nothing but the destruction of that heritage of our fathers?

John Amery

#78. American audiences tend to underappreciate the British, but 240 years ago they were us: They were the most powerful nation on Earth. Their mercantile empire spanned the planet. They had the most potent and experienced army and navy the world had ever seen.

Rick Atkinson

#79. The Roman Empire, Vikings, British, Spanish, Portuguese,... all raped women, but it always seems worse when done to us.

Daniel Marques

#80. 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.

David Harsanyi

#81. Sirs, if it were not for that one red spot I would have conquered the world!!!

Napoleon Bonaparte

#82. 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.

Mahatma Gandhi

#83. The whole process of claiming a colony (on land already occupied by other people) is awfully arbitrary in the first place. Essentially, the British built their empire by sailing around and sticking flags on random beaches.

Randall Munroe

#84. I've always felt, with 'The Iliad,' a real frustration that it's read wrong. That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes - it's become a cliched, British empire part of our culture.

Alice Oswald

#85. Tea? Good God, no. It's mud. How the British ever built an empire drinking the filthy stuff is beyond me. And if we carry on drinking it, I've no doubt that the empire won't last much longer. No, a civilized person drinks coffee.

Charlie Higson

#86. The Brit abroad is always the voice of caution. Persons of other cultures are known to be undisciplined, prone to leaning out of car windows and cooking with garlic.

Nick Harkaway

#87. British Empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world.

Niall Ferguson

#88. He sat there all through a history lesson about the Roman Empire, which
having lived in the Roman Empire, for the four hundred years during which it had included the British Isles
he found inaccurate and boring.

Susan Cooper

#89. No one could seriously dispute that almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, all of North Africa except Morocco, all of the Middle East except Israel and Jordan and most of the oil-rich states, and the entire former British Indian Empire were better governed by Europeans.

Conrad Black

#90. Here is the irony: Europe dominated the world, but it failed to dominate itself. For five hundred years Europe tore itself apart in civil wars, and as a result there was never a European empire - there was instead a British empire, a Spanish empire, a French empire, a Portuguese empire, and so on.

George Friedman

#91. The English, he thought, had once conquered most of the known world, but their cooking hadn't improved as a result.

Lavie Tidhar

#92. 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.

Neville Chamberlain

#93. In India, as we saw, the Sepoy Mutiny led to a vast reorganization of British colonialism in the area, sending out a viceroy from London and before too long, Queen Victoria was proclaimed "Empress of India," with this great empire, ruling over maharajahs and other local potentates.

Webster Tarpley

#94. 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.

Mark Shand

#95. Every empire has to get sucked down the drain. As a British person, I know how it feels.

John Oliver

#96. Because of the long, long history of British shipping, immigration, trade, empire, missionaries, you can have a better shot at telling a worldwide story in the British Museum's collection than any other. Britain has been more connected with the rest of the world than any other country, for longer.

Neil MacGregor

#97. Every empire suffers from hubris, arrogance and condescension, and therefore a moral blindness. That's true of the American empire, it was true of the British Empireearlier, and it will certainly be true of the Chinese Empire in the future.

Cornel West

#98. 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.

James Buchan

#99. 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.

Joseph Howe

#100. The dream of empire died when Shanghai surrendered without a fight. Even at the age of 11 or 12, I knew that no amount of patriotic newsreels would put the Union Jack jigsaw together again. From then on, I was slightly suspicious of all British adults.

J.G. Ballard