Ken Loach Quotes

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.

Britons are good, though often brutal, colonists where they come into relations with entirely uncivilized tribes whose past is so remote as to be forgotten. But they trample with their heavy boots over the sensitive, delicate susceptibilities of an ancient, highly civilized and cultured nation, such as India.

The decades of Imperialism have been prolific in wars; most of these wars have been directly motived by aggression of white races upon "lower races," and have issued in the forcible seizure of territory. Every one of the steps of expansion in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific has been accompanied by bloodshed; each imperialist Power keeps an increasing army available for foreign service; rectification of frontiers, punitive expeditions, and other euphemisms for war ...

Great Britain's governing principles are conquest, colonialization, commerce, monopoly.

The jury is still out, and may always be out over whether the Britain benefited from the Empire or not.

There is nothing democratic about the Whig. He is essentially a cold and selfish aristocrat who believes that the British Empire was created by Providence and exists for no other purpose than to keep in power a few Whig families.

We are a free people; and now you have planted in our country the title deeds of our future slavery. You are neither god nor demon; who are you, then, to make slaves? Orou! You understand the language of these men, tell us all, as you have told me, what they have written on this sheet of metal: This country is ours. This country yours? And why? Because you have walked thereon? If a Tahitian landed one day on your shores, and scratched on one of your rocks or on the bark of your trees: This country belongs to the people of Tahiti - what would you think?

The Queen of England gave me the honor of the Order of the British Empire for working with children.

One of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck; another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters

Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object

But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.

My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.

I think there was a bit of brotherly love, but I think everything has a motive when you're king. It's all about maintaining that power - securing that power - and I think Edward was very skillful at doing that. I think he was a great king. Opinions are split, if you look at what he's done and written about him.

I think as English people, we don't want to be reminded that at one point we ruled three-quarters of the globe, and now we're a very small country that doesn't own three-quarters of the globe.

If you think of every single continent there is, on every continent, there is something, a natural resource that every continent has, or sources, that they can really survive with that, or they can trade with that. But a lot of the developed nations have taken those things from those places and have claimed it and, therefore, they're dependent on those other nations.

Other lands became a larder full of all the good things All we had to do was go and take Blood the colour of the rain that grew our wicked harvest Black the colour icing on our cake

Through its imperialist system Britain brought about untold suffering of millions of people. And this is an historical fact. To be able to admit this would increase the respect, you know, which we have for British institutions.

The scientific world, the materialistic world, the world of commerce, the world of business, the world of individualism, the world of capitalism, world of communism - all these worlds are the old story now. Where we think we exploit nature, we exploit people. Market rules, profit rules, money rules. We work for name, fame, power, money, profit. That's the old story.

History teaches us that whenever a weak and ignorant people possess a thing which a strong and enlightened people want, it must be yielded up peaceably.

[regarding US conquest of the Philippines] I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines ... We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.

Colonialism has a bad reputation in the modern context, but Colonial Africa was a far better place for both black and white before the colonists gave up.

If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism.

I don't think losing things - in my case, the use of my legs - really damages or hurts you. What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation. A lot of the wars going on right now in the Middle East aren't about poverty and exploitation. They're about humiliation. For a long time, the British and French have been humiliating the people of the Middle East, and encouraging people like Israel to do the same. Israel started out as a socialist state, but we always encouraged them to become rather racist and look down on the local inhabitants, which they now do. It's sad that's happened.

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

The descent of Israel from the morally towering position of a 'light for the nations' to the lowest of the low and one of the last relics of bygone shameful times of merciless imperialism, conquest, exploitation is on the cards.