Ben Elton Quotes

France has never gotten over the fact that it was once a great power and is now just a great nuisance.

The belief in American exceptionalism has vanished with the end of empire, the weakening of power, the loss of faith in America’s future.

This country has had 200 years of hegemony over the rest of the world, and it feels like our politicians, they just want to give that back.

The sun of her [Great Britain] glory is fast descending to the horizon. Her philosophy has crossed the Channel, her freedom the Atlantic, and herself seems passing to that awful dissolution, whose issue is not given human foresight to scan.

The great empire will be torn from limb, the all-powerful one for more than four-hundred years: Great power given to the dark one from slaves come.

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.

In the span of a human lifetime, and well within the collective memory, Britain went from a stable imperial power ruling an appreciable fraction of the Earth's surface to being a tumultuous patchwork which was at least superficially in decline.

We criticize, copy, patronize, idolize and insult but we never doubt that the U.S. has a unique position in the history of human hopes.

America might be a dying empire, but it's not going to die in our lifetime - and it doesn't have to die at all.

While the West has enjoyed overwhelming global power, its moral preachings have been legitimised, and in effect enforced, by that power. But as that power begins to ebb, then the morality of its actions will be the subject of growing scrutiny and challenge.

A great nation cannot throw off the responsibilities which its past history and its position in the world have imposed upon it.

There is not a man here [in Congress] who does not feel four hundred percent bigger in 1900—bigger intellectually, bigger, hopefully, bigger patriotically that he as a citizen of a country that has become a world power.

If the resistance of the Americans is successful, this memorable epoch will reduce England to a point where she will no longer cause disquietude to France, whose consideration on the Continent will increase in proportion to the enfeeblement of the British Empire.

Old systems do not fold willingly, particularly when they control gargantuan amounts of wealth and power. But like empires of old - from the Romans to the Hapsburgs to the colonial British - even the largest do fall.

Britain is a great country. We can more or less say what we like, and we can walk down the street without anyone trying to kill us. I know it's tough for some people, but generally we live in a caring society. We live in a great country, but we're no longer a great power. Part of the problem with some elements of the European debate is that they hanker for the days when we were a great power. Those days are gone, and they went a long time ago.

We are the greatest power in the world. If we behave like it.

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.

India does not need to become anything else. India must become only India. This is a country that once upon a time was called 'the golden bird'. We have fallen from where we were before. But now we have the chance to rise again. If you see the details of the last five or ten centuries, you will see that India and China have grown at similar paces. Their contributions to global GDP have risen in parallel, and fallen in parallel. Today's era once again belongs to Asia. India and China are both growing rapidly, together. That is why India needs to remain India.

The moment Germany rises as a great power, France gains a new importance as a cultural power.

In the same way the Brits had to get used to the idea that the sun had set on the British Empire, I think that there's the subrosa feeling that we are at the end of the American century, and I think that's very, very hard for Americans to take.

France has not been able to come to terms with the fact that it's not a major power anymore. I mean even before the Second World War Paris was one of the main centers of intellectual and cultural life. But now Paris is a kind of subsidiary of Germany, their traditional enemy and they can't come to terms with it.

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.

America now stands as the world's foremost power. We should be proud: Not since the age of the Romans have one people achieved such preeminence. But we are not Romans; we do not seek an empire. We are Americans, trustees of a vision and a heritage that commit us to the values of democracy and the universal cause of human rights.

The United States of America will sound as pompously in the world or in history as The Kingdom of Great Britain.