Famous quotes containing the words british, empire and/or decline:
“We may be scum, but at least we’re la crème de la scum.”
—Report on the British royal family. quoted in Sunday Times (London, Nov. 13, 1988)
“The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it.... “Beware of me,” it says, “but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“My opposition [to interviews] lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)