Famous quotes containing the words british empire, british, empire and/or decline:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“Quite frankly, if you bed people of belowstairs class, they go to the papers.”
—Jane Clark, British millionaire politician’s wife. As quoted in Newsweek magazine, p. 15 (June 13, 1994)
“London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall—which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)