British Empire Quotes - Page 3

• One would have thought that if there was one cause in the world which the Conservative party would have hastened to defend, it would be the cause of the British Empire in India ... Our fight is hard. It will also be long ... But win or lose, we must do our duty. If the British people are to lose their Indian Empire, they shall do so with their eyes open.

  Winston Churchill

  Party, Eye, Fighting

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• 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

  Brother, Fate, History

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• 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

  Height, Empires, England

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• Nothing lasts forever, whether it's Greece, Rome or the British Empire. It doesn't mean that America has to end. The country could be reshaped and reimagined in a way that is even more democratic and less imperial in nature. We're trying to radically reshape the nation in ways that are more just and fairer. That's what I mean when I say that empires eventually fall. I'm not calling for the end of America. I'm just calling for a reimagination of its democratic possibilities.

  Marc Lamont Hill

  Country, Fall, Mean

  Source: www.theskanner.com

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• Gandhi was only minding his own business when he took a walk to get some salt and ended up overthrowing the British Empire. You can't set out to overthrow an empire, but if you have to get some salt then get some salt.  If you have to write some independent songs that are honest, just write them.  If you have to do a day job stacking shelves, so be it.

  David Knopfler

  Song, Jobs, Writing

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• All these mountains of Irish dead, all these corpses mangled beyond recognition, all these arms, legs, eyes, ears, fingers, toes, hands, all these shivering putrefying bodies and portions of bodies once warm living and tender parts of Irish men and youths - all these horrors in Flanders or the Gallipoli Peninsula, are all items in the price Ireland pays for being part of the British Empire.

  James Connolly

  Eye, Men, Hands

  James Connolly (1988). “Collected Works: Labour and Easter Week”

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• Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been different, but the result would once again be disaster. What happened in America was really round two of those wars - the civil war of the British Empire, with the Hanoverians playing the part of the Stuarts, and the Americans the heirs of the revolutionaries, of Cromwell and of William III, the inheritors of a true British liberty, that had somehow got lost in its own motherland.

  Simon Schama

  War, Two, America

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• 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

  Years, Lasts, Next

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• 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.

  Oliver Stone

  War, World, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• 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

  Queens, Nice, Drama

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• the twelve or fifteen millions in the British Empire, who, while they possess no electoral rights, are yet persuaded they are freemen, and who are mystified into the notion that they are not political bondmen, by that great juggle of the ' English Constitution ' a thing of monopolies, and Church-craft, and sinecures, armorial hocus-pocus, primogeniture, and pageantry!

  Richard Cobden

  Rights, Political, Church

  Richard Cobden (2007). “Richard Cobden's German Diaries”, p.24, Walter de Gruyter

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

  Kesha

  War, Party, Empires

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

  Ze'ev Jabotinsky

  Blow, Might, Empires

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• ... 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

  Military, Historical, Empires

  Franz Halder, Charles Burton Burdick, Hans Adolf Jacobsen (1988). “The Halder war diary, 1939-1942”, Presidio Pr

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• 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

  Country, Government, Europe

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke" by James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

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• 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

  Fall, Believe, Power

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.215, Cosimo, Inc.

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• I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.

  Muhammad Iqbal

  Destiny, Government, Self

  Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1978). “Letters of Iqbal”

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• 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

  Fall, Empires, Decline

  "'You have naked bodies and genitalia, don't you? Why are you so adolescent?': Director Peter Greenaway on 'Puritan' Americans and the intense sex scenes in 'Eisenstein in Guanajuato'". Interview with Gary M. Kramer, www.salon.com. February 4, 2016.

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• 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

  Giving Up, Circles, Allies

  "Tim Buck A Conscience for Canada". Book by Oscar Ryan, 1957.

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• 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

  Chinese, Suffering, Arrogance

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

  Oswald Mosley

  Wake Up, Empires, British

  Oswald Mosley (1957). “Mosley: the facts”

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• 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

  Revenge, Yield, Cost

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• These two great organisations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some affairs for mutual and general advantage. I do not view the process with any misgivings. I could not stop it if I wished. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands, and better days.

  Winston Churchill

  Views, Land, Two

  Churchill's "The Few" Speech, www.foxnews.com. August 20, 1940.

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• In the late 1930s, both the British and American movie industries made a succession of films celebrating the decency of the British Empire in order to challenge the threatening tide of Nazism and fascism and also to provide employment for actors from Los Angeles's British colony. The best two were Hollywood's Gunga Din and Britain's The Four Feathers...

  Philip French

  Order, Two, Challenges

  "The Four Feathers" by Philip French, www.theguardian.com. February 17, 2007.

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• 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

  Song, Couple, Writing

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