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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
Were you to read the British press today, you would learn that the British Empire never forgets its defeats. -- Robert Trout
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
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
When Marcus Garvey died in 1940, the role of the British Empire was already being challenged by India and the rising expectations of her African colonies. Marcus Garvey's avocation of African redemption and the restoration of the African state's sovereign political entity in world affairs was still a dream without fulfillment. -- John Henrik Clarke
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
If we don't stop behaving like the British Empire, we will end up like the British Empire. -- Pat Buchanan
It is fundamental to socialism that we should liquidate the British Empire as soon as we can -- Stafford Cripps
I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. -- Winston Churchill
I feel like Ive been engaged to the British Empire since 1980 and tonight you have given me the ring knighthood. -- Steven Spielberg
I am leading a war against the British Empire. I'm not worried about what Democratic Party hacks say or do. -- Kesha
... 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
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
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 Churchill
If you want something bad enough, you've got to make a bold move. George Washington, took on the British Empire. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Ken Titus taped a hotel key to his underwear to score with an airport security guard. -- Christopher Titus
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
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... -- Neville Chamberlain
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
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
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
All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake. -- June Jordan
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
I am now a commander of the British Empire. -- Kevin Spacey
To destroy Christianity, we must first destroy the British Empire. -- Karl Marx
Can't' will be the epitaph of the British Empire - unless we wake up in time. -- Oswald Mosley
I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900. -- Nick Hornby
The sun never sets on the British Empire. But it rises every morning. The sky must get awfully crowded. -- Steven Wright
Were you to read the British press today, you would learn that the British Empire never forgets its defeats." -- Robert Trout
Britain is the only colony in the British Empire and it is up to us now to liberate ourselves. -- Tony Benn
The fate of the Celt in the British Empire bids fair to resemble that of the Greeks among the Romans. -- Joseph Jacobs
Commanders and senior officers should die with troops. The honour of the British Empire and the British Army is at stake. -- Lord Randolph Churchill
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
People fail you, children disappoint you, thieves break in, moths corrupt, but an Order of the British Empire goes on for ever. -- Fay Weldon
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
[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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The British Empire was so vast and so powerful, the sun would never set on it. This is how big it was, yet these 13 little scrawny states, tired of taxation without representation, tired of being exploited and oppressed and degraded, told that big British Empire, liberty or death. -- Malcolm X
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
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
Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus - for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork - sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes." -- Virginia Woolf
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
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
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
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
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
Every empire has to get sucked down the drain. As a British person, I know how it feels. -- John Oliver
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
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. -- Gary Oldman
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

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