Quotes About Empire

Petchenegs versus Byzantium," said Jimmy, one memorable day.

Can't' will be the epitaph of the British Empire - unless we wake up in time.

We must now face the difficult task of moving towards a single economy, a single political entity .. For the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire we have the opportunity to unite Europe.

God is the ruler of history. His times are well chosen The Roman Empire was an instrument in his hand. And so are the nations of the modern world.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world.

The Empire was the world. All that lay beyond was chaos and misery and struggle and strife. I was a soldier. I could fight.

Rome swallowed things and made them Roman.

Having long identified my own soul with the salvation of the Empire, I felt no consolation in this city. I felt suspicion and profound distaste.

The book is Brittany and the Angevins: Province and Empire, 1158–1203, by Judith A. Everard

If, like the Romans, he must make a desert and call it peace, so be it.

Yes, there were good memories, too, thirty-seven years of good and bad. Quarrels and reconciliations. Eight cradles and too many gravestones and Rosamund Clifford and power that rivalled Caesar's, an empire that stretched from the Scots border to the Mediterranean Sea.

If ever the Empire comes to ruin, Heaslop, mark my words, the British publisher will be to blame.

Alex von Tunzelmann's clever start to her book Indian Summer made my point most tellingly: In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.

The ISI may well be Pakistan's answer to the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy, Roman nor an empire: it

Basic truth about the colonies, Heaslop. Any time there's trouble, you can put it down to books. Too many of the wrong ideas getting into the heads of the wrong sorts of people. If ever the Empire comes to ruin, Heaslop, mark my words, the British publisher will be to blame.

the foremost Indian research institution under the British empire, the Indian Institute of Science, was endowed by the legendary Jamsetji Tata, not by any British philanthropist, let alone by the colonial government.

Indians were always subjects, never citizens; throughout the days of Empire, no Indian could have presumed to say 'I am British' the way a French African was encouraged to say 'Je suis français'.

Whereas an Akbar might have used such technologies to fuse his diverse people together, the British used them to separate, classify and divide.

The British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and what it meant to its subject peoples.

The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent of the population. The Empire, in Hobsbawm's evocative words, was 'so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many.

Empire was in many ways the vehicle for the extension of British social structures to the colonies they conquered.

India's share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

India, under Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, accounts for 27 per cent of the world economy.

the Bengali intellectual and author of the bestselling Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), with its cringe-worthy dedication to the British empire in India: To