Imperial Ambitions Quotes

Without Ukraine, Russia's imperial aspirations are essentially nostalgia, but it's not a real policy.

What the city [Constantinople] contains is its own; beyond the walls it has no dominion—owns nothing. If I want to build a castle at the Sacred Mouth, it can’t forbid me. Tell your emperor this: The sultan who now rules is not like his predecessors. What they couldn’t achieve, he can do easily and at once. The things they did not wish to do, he certainly does. The next man who comes here on a mission like this will be flayed alive.

I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire.

At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.

The gulf between imperial ideals and empire on the ground has customarily proved disillusioning not only for colonial peoples but also for some in the occupying power.

It is surely no coincidence that Napoleon's two greatest heroes were Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. In certain respects, he would outdo them both.

Japan has won a reputation in certain quarters of the world for being imperialistic and aggressive. No impartial student of politics can deny that there were grounds for the criticism.

By the time Napoleon abandoned his army to its fate in Poland - arriving back in Paris on 5 December - it numbered fewer than 10,000 effectives. It was a disaster from which he would never recover.

…to the assumption…that an enlargement of the British dominion in the Southern Africa is a national advantage, I find myself unable to assent.

Belgium became dazzled by the dream of empire. [British colonial] Africa is but a small part of Britain; [French colonial] Africa is but a half of larger France. But the Congo is eighty-two times the size of little Belgium …

Empires always have the hubris to think they are indestructible, when in fact they are always unsustainable.

The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.

The 1890s was an intensely patriotic decade for Americans. It was a time of neo-imperialism, when the European powers and the United States were establishing their flags around the globe.

From the very beginning, Americans have exhibited a taste for expansion, an appetite for empire. One of the fundamental reasons for this is very clear. Like every other western empire that has ever existed, Americans may claim to have inherited the mantle of ancient Rome.

When I review Xerxes' achievements, I praise him, not for having yoked the Hellespont, but for having crossed it. But I can see that Nero will neither sail through the Isthmus nor complete his digging.

Where is this godly tower of Commonwealth, which the English boasted they would build to overshadow Kings and be another Rome in the West?

Look at the history of empires. They come and they go. They ebb and they flow.

The American empire will not disappear... because America does not have an empire.

The United States although a superpower was never an empire..

America has never been an empire. … We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused.

Whereas the British were generally quite open about the fact that they were running an empire, few Americans politicians today would use the “e” word as anything other than a term of abuse.

President Putin will run again in the 2018 election. He wants to be the czar of this new Russian empire that he is rebuilding. I think he is really obsessed with the idea.

If it had not been for the English I should have been emperor of the East, but wherever there is water to float a ship we are sure to find them in our way.

I happen to think that as the Ukraine moves to the West, towards the E.U., eventually towards NATO, it will pave the way also for Russia moving towards the West. Because it will become a logical extension of the same process, and it will eliminate any imperial ambitions.

I'm not interested in being a wife. I'm interested in being an empress.