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)
“A certain secret jealousy of the British Minister is always lurking in the breast of every American Senator, if he is truly democratic; for democracy, rightly understood, is the government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators, and there is always a danger that the British Minister may not understand this political principle as he should.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“The decline of a culture
Mourned by scholars who dream of the ghosts of Greek boys.”
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)