Linda Colley Quotes

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Linda Colley

Profession : Historian

Birth : September 13, 1949

In the past, rulers led their troops into battle and, even in peacetime, called themselves fathers of their people. And modern politics retains abundant masculine rituals. Prime minister's question time in Britain, for instance, is a stylised duel and tournament redolent of testosterone.

Linda Colley

Anyone who has spoken to experienced combat troops knows that they rarely brag about their exploits. Strong and silent is the preferred style.

Linda Colley

Partly because women in the U.S. are better represented in the hierarchies, the culture wars over gender there have been particularly fierce.

Linda Colley

Britain, like other European states, is not and never will again be in the top-world-power league, so its male leaders can afford to play subtler, more variegated roles. Leaders of the U.S. don't have that option.

Linda Colley

It is hard to convince people that you mean them well if you are looking at them down the barrel of a gun.

Linda Colley

Instead of exporting what they perceived to be rational, modern, humane government to their colonies, the British often found themselves propping up deeply unattractive and corrupt princelings and client rulers because this was the cheapest way of maintaining control.

Linda Colley

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.

Linda Colley

In the past, the imperialism of the West, like that of the rest, was often difficult - for the doers as well as for their victims - but western states were, nonetheless, usually able to dispatch forces overseas against non-western peoples without any fear of being attacked themselves. That kind of immunity is probably now a thing of the past.

Linda Colley

A society that feels itself to be flourishing is likely to interpret everything that happens to its own advantage and in its own image. By contrast, a society that feels confused or in decline often converts any event - however innocuous - into a weapon of self-laceration.

Linda Colley

I was in Boston, Massachusetts, when Princess Diana died.

Linda Colley

Many Americans remain very interested in royal goings-on in general, and not just because of their soap-opera appeal. To a greater degree than any other polity, Britain functions as Americans' defining 'other.'

Linda Colley

Since the Second World War, as female expectations and opportunities have risen, becoming a royal woman - and remaining a royal woman - has seemed less and less an attractive proposition.

Linda Colley

Traditionally, royal females who have not had the luck to become queens regnant have been granted very limited roles. They have been expected to look pretty, be discreet, do charitable good deeds, and - if married to princes or kings - be quietly supportive and, above all, fertile.

Linda Colley

In the U.S. - and elsewhere - successful parties need a storyline that voters can relate to, an intelligible plot of some sort, especially now that so many older, formal ideologies have lost force. For proof of this, one has only to look at Margaret Thatcher's career and ideas.

Linda Colley

Empire in the past was always a far harsher and much more accident-prone business than conventional history books imply. And the costs of these overseas invasions were borne not just by those on the receiving end but - frequently - by ordinary, vulnerable people among or associated with the invaders.

Linda Colley

America's soldiery, like its war dead, comes disproportionately from its southern states and from its aspiring poor - both white and black.

Linda Colley

The children of politicians learn the allure and tricks of politics along with their alphabet. They inherit a network of useful contacts, and - if they're lucky - a name that confers instant voter recognition.

Linda Colley

In 21st-century America, as in Georgian Britain, elections are raucous, flamboyant, flag-waving, expensive, and sometimes ramshackle things.

Linda Colley

As Ronald Reagan demonstrated, it is still possible to progress if not from a log cabin at least from obscurity to the White House. It is also rare.

Linda Colley

America's entire homeland security enterprise positively invites questions even as it strives to reassure.

Linda Colley