Edward Said Quotes

So if you look back over the long history of China, they've never tried to take over the world, but they've been quite aggressive in their own neighborhood... in carrying out their own purposes and interests in their sphere of the world.

I did a history degree once.

Empires aren’t out there to do good. They are out there to benefit the nation state.

Look at the history of empires. They come and they go. They ebb and they flow.

in their ideal forms nation and empire stand at opposite ends of a political spectrum, but in the actuality of history they influenced, reinforced, and undermined one another at different times and in different ways.

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.

If we don't stop behaving like the British Empire, we will end up like the British Empire.

Imperialism is the factor in American policy, not just since 1898, but in fact long before it when we were expanding across this continent and taking away Indian lands in order to enlarge the territory of the United States. We have been an imperial power and an expansionist power for a very long time.

We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America!

But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality.

The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies.

Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it.

I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race..

This [American] empire will not last. No empire does. If empires lasted, the whole world would be speaking ancient Persian today.

There must … be only one empire, one faith, and one sovereignty in the world.

If ... America is to become an empire, there is very little chance that it can avoid becoming a virtual dictatorship as well.

His Majesty’s possessions in North America are so many times more extensive than the Islands of Great Britain, that if they were equally well inhabited, Great Britain could no longer maintain her dominion over them. It is therefore evidently her Policy to set bounds to the increment of People, and to the extent of the settlement of that Country.

The main purpose of stationing a large body of troops in America will be to secure the dependence of the colonies on Great Britain

Existing colonial empires rest upon insecure foundations. There seems, indeed, something unnatural in the spectacle of seven million Dutch ruling over fifty million Malays.

As an Englishman, particularly as an Englishman standing upon foreign soil, I am, of course, prepared to argue that every war we have ever fought was a purely defensive war. But I am obliged to take cognizance of the quite simple historical fact that for about one thousand years, since the time indeed when Norwegians ravaged our coasts and a certain Scandinavian landed at Hastings in 1066, every war we have fought happens to have been fought in other people's countries. Now if defense means merely keeping burglars out of the house, what were we doing on all those occasions in other people's houses?

Long did I endeavor … to preserve from breaking that fine and noble vase, the British Empire; for I knew that, being once broken, the separate parts could not retain even their share of the strength or value that existed in the whole.

It looks like the so-called "winners" of the Cold War are determined to have it all, and reshape the world into a place that could better serve their interests alone.

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.

The United States tyrannizes and pillages the globalized world with its political, economic, technological, and military might.

The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.