Famous quotes containing the words british empire, british, empire and/or decline:
“It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Jane Hudson: Bravo.
Rosano Brazzi: Grazie.
Jane Hudson: Prego. That about concludes my entire performance in Italian.”
—H.E. Bates, British screenwriter, and David Lean. Jane Hudson (Katherine Hepburn)
“The trouble with Freud is that he never played the Glasgow Empire Saturday night.”
—Ken Dodd (b. 1931)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)