Kwasi Kwarteng Quotes

When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.

I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it.

You know, the Brits had a way of - running an empire. And I don't think America is comfortable with an empire.

How is the Empire?

The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.

We have got over our imperial past, and the withdrawal symptoms.

For Carolina once ruined and destroyed, the extermination of her [England's] colonial dependencies will follow.

The foundations of empire are often occasions of woe; their dismemberment, always.

The British Empire is the greatest secular agency for good now known to mankind.

With nearly every great European empire today walks its dark colonial shadow …

England was the first true colonial power to use its dominion over a large part of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, North America, and many Caribbean islands, in the first half of the 20th century.

There can never be a single, satisfactory comprehensive account of the 'history of the British empire.'

The British especially have no excuse for forgetting that empire is a most complex and persistent beast. And it has claws.

In the past, Britons were scathing about the cruelties of the old Roman empire and the excesses of Catholic empire builders such as the Spanish and the French. They convinced themselves that their empire was different and benign because it rested on sea power and trade rather than on armies.

There seems to be no end of books about the British empire, and the fascination it holds for historians of all descriptions is inexhaustible.

Whatever was the conduct of England, I am equally arraigned.

Like a cyclone, imperialism spins across the globe; militarism crushes peoples and sucks their blood like a vampire.

Britons are good, though often brutal, colonists where they come into relations with entirely uncivilized tribes whose past is so remote as to be forgotten. But they trample with their heavy boots over the sensitive, delicate susceptibilities of an ancient, highly civilized and cultured nation, such as India.

In the past, on Earth, it has largely been to exploit foreign resources and to expand the domestic territory.

Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European's control over the world.

You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.

In recent times, European nations, with the use of gunpowder and other technical improvements in warfare, controlled practically the whole world. One, the British Empire, brought under one government a quarter of the earth and its inhabitants.

Who colonized the other – us or them? Did Algeria colonize France, or vice versa? Did Egypt colonize England, or vice versa? We are the victims...

The enthusiasm for colonies is dead.

The British Empire wasn't some project designed to bring enlightenment to ignorant savages, but rather a brutal and rapacious exploitation of peoples who were often more humane than us.