Linda Colley Quotes

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Linda Colley

Profession : Historian

Birth : September 13, 1949

Modernity is a shifting entity, not easily defined. Exactly the same is true of empire.

Linda Colley

Now, as in the past, rank is closely associated with modes of representation and display: with making an ordered arrangement of people or things visible and evident to onlookers in some fashion.

Linda Colley

Monarchs, aristocrats, and other powerful and wealthy individuals have usually been happy to have themselves and their possessions and families immortalised in oil paintings and sculpture. But before the 20th century, such dynasts rarely commissioned artworks that set out to represent society as a whole.

Linda Colley

Both Conservative and Labour politicians in Britain are rather too fond of praising the relative 'classlessness' of American society and of urging their own people to emulate it. There is a certain falseness about such arguments, and also a certain hypocrisy.

Linda Colley

The United States was founded on a revolution that abolished the monarchy, aristocracy, titles and primogeniture. Britain may be able in the future to become a more equal and open society while retaining all of these things. But this has yet to be proved.

Linda Colley

Hillary Clinton is tough, clever, and formidably well briefed, and has been politically ambitious all her adult life.

Linda Colley

Had Barack Obama been obliged to take his degree at the University of Akron, say, it is doubtful that his progress would have been remotely as stellar.

Linda Colley

Historically, individuals possessed of the confidence that privilege and good fortune bestow have often proved conspicuous reformers: think only of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Linda Colley

One of the reasons why the personnel of U.S. politics are more diverse is that - unlike the U.K. - one can compete for the top job without spending long years, or any years, in the nation's legislature.

Linda Colley

One knows something is important when the powers that be choose not to acknowledge it in public.

Linda Colley

Even leaving aside its military bases, America's influence on the domestic ordering of British life has been enormous, though sometimes unrecognised.

Linda Colley

Postcolonial critics are, I suspect, wrong when they argue that the mass of British people still mourn the loss of empire. But Britain's politicians - and its Foreign Office - have found it hard to adjust to the loss, not so much of onetime colonies as of the global clout the colonies once afforded.

Linda Colley

Conservative and Labour governments have arguably championed British rights in Brussels so ostentatiously in order to deflect public attention away from their deference to Washington.

Linda Colley

In the 16th and 17th centuries, most people in Britain lived in small village communities. They knew all their neighbours. They dressed alike, and almost all were white. The vast majority belonged to the same religion and spoke much the same language.

Linda Colley

Acts of violence against one's own countrymen that are legitimated by religion are not new. Nor have such acts been unique to Islam.

Linda Colley

Historically, religion has often proved a more lethal and more divisive force than any secular ideology. It has also often been a more divisive force than race.

Linda Colley

States that have experienced revolutions or have acquired their independence from empires - such as the U.S. or Australia - tend to celebrate their constitutional documents and put them on show in special galleries so that every citizen can become familiar with them. In the U.K., this is not properly done.

Linda Colley

Like the proverbial elephant in the room, American anti-Europeanism has loomed large for so long that few trouble to notice it.

Linda Colley

Much of how Americans have always understood their history, culture, and identity depends on positioning Europe as the 'other,' as that 'old world' against which they define themselves.

Linda Colley

American prejudices about Europe rarely surface in headlines, but they are real, pervasive, and ingrained.

Linda Colley