Linda Colley Quotes

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.

All comparisons between America's current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the Roman Empire.

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

The American empire will not disappear... because America does not have an empire.

You know, the Brits had a way of - running an empire. And I don't think America is comfortable with an empire.

How is the Empire?

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.

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

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

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

American imperialism has always been the imperialism that has been frightened of speaking its name. Now it's beginning to do so. In a way, it's better. We know where we kneel.

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.

The 1890s was an intensely patriotic decade for Americans. It was a time of neo-imperialism, when the European powers and the United States were establishing their flags around the globe.

The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.

You annex foreign land, not your own country.

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

…the only alternative to the communist World Empire is an American Empire, which will be, if not literally worldwide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control.

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

America has never been an empire. … We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused.

For Carolina once ruined and destroyed, the extermination of her [England's] colonial dependencies will follow.

… and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas

Our first sight in Egypt, be it by larceny or be it by preemption, will be the almost certain egg of a North African Empire that will grow and grow until … we finally join hands across the equator with Natal and Cape Town.

1st RULER and TYRANT of the AMERICAN EMPIRE

The British should leave Egypt and … as the price of that policy and the favor England would thereby win from France, you should be able, without spending a shilling or losing a man, to annex China to the Indian Empire.