Famous quotes containing the words british, empire and/or decline:
“The British are a self-distrustful, diffident people, agreeing with alacrity that they are neither successful nor clever, and only modestly claiming that they have a keener sense of humour, more robust common sense, and greater staying power as a nation than all the rest of the world put together.”
—Quoted in Fourth Leaders from the Times (1950)
“Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)