Kwasi Kwarteng Quotes

We have got over our imperial past, and the withdrawal symptoms.

The foundations of empire are often occasions of woe; their dismemberment, always.

With nearly every great European empire today walks its dark colonial shadow …

There seems to be no end of books about the British empire, and the fascination it holds for historians of all descriptions is inexhaustible.

Whatever was the conduct of England, I am equally arraigned.

If you look at the history of the U.S., we were an empire long before we were a nation.

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.

I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it.

How is the Empire?

The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.

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

Whereas the British were generally quite open about the fact that they were running an empire, few Americans politicians today would use the “e” word as anything other than a term of abuse.

He was in time to witness the destruction of the Summer Palace at Peking--the act by which Lord Elgin, in the name of European civilization, took vengeance upon the barbarism of the East.

Our army is really an imperial army…. We used to wonder why British imperialists went to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The United States although a superpower was never an empire..

England was the first true colonial power to use its dominion over a large part of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, North America, and many Caribbean islands, in the first half of the 20th century.

From the very beginning, Americans have exhibited a taste for expansion, an appetite for empire. One of the fundamental reasons for this is very clear. Like every other western empire that has ever existed, Americans may claim to have inherited the mantle of ancient Rome.

There can never be a single, satisfactory comprehensive account of the 'history of the British empire.'

The British especially have no excuse for forgetting that empire is a most complex and persistent beast. And it has claws.

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.

But while the British empire is easy to write about, it is very difficult to summarise. This is because what we call 'empire' spans 400 years in time and thousands of miles in space; every continent on Earth was directly affected by it.

Empires just don’t bargain.

We seem at, the present time to have arrived at the acute stage of the colonial fever which during the last three or four years has afflicted the various powers of Europe. Germany is vying with France, England with both, in the haste to seize upon “unoccupied” countries, and to establish “protectorates” – the cant diplomatic for incomplete annexation – over uncivilized peoples.

Let it be known that war with a colony is war with England.

We should keep the Panama Canal because we stole it fair and square.