Empire Quotes

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose -- some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?

Mark Twain

The reluctant obedience of distant provinces generally costs more than it The Territory is worth. Empires which branch out widely are often more flourishing for a little timely pruning.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

Dean Acheson

Roman, remember that you shall rule the nations by your authority, for this is to be your skill, to make peace the custom, to spare the conquered, and to wage war until the haughty are brought low.

Virgil

How is the Empire?

King George V

To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation that is governed by shopkeepers.

Adam Smith

Empires built on force will always be destroyed. Those built on trust in Christ will remain.

Joseph R. Sizoo

There is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavor and then leave it half done. This is what the West has done with its colonial system. It shook all the societies in the world loose from their old moorings. But it seems indifferent whether or not they reach safe harbor in the end.

Dame Barbara Ward

Without the Empire we should be tossed like a cork in the cross current of world politics. It is at once our sword and our shield.

William Morris Hughes

Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.

Han Suyin

If Germany is to become a colonizing power, all I say is, God speed her! She becomes our ally and partner in the execution of the great purposes of Providence for the advantage of mankind.

William Ewart Gladstone

An empire is an immense egotism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sovereignty over any foreign land is insecure.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it.

Joseph Conrad

The day of small nations has long passed away. The day of Empires has come.

Joseph Chamberlain

A thousand years may scare form a state. An hour may lay it in ruins.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.

William Blake

Keep our Empire undismembered guide our Forces by Thy Hand, gallant blacks from far Jamaica, Honduras and Togoland; protect them Lord in all their fights, and even more, protect the whites.

John Betjeman

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.

Aristotle

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, and the epitaph drear: A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.

Rudyard Kipling