Linda Colley Quotes

Author Image

Linda Colley

Profession : Historian

Birth : September 13, 1949

If you believe you are the city on the hill, the world's best hope, it is tempting also to believe that outside your boundaries are barbarians.

Linda Colley

The U.S. is the most benign great power we will see in our lifetimes, and it is important for global peace that its leaders continue to value being viewed as benign.

Linda Colley

Thanksgiving is America's favourite holiday, and a brilliant piece of personal as well as patriotic calendrical invention.

Linda Colley

Never fly to the U.S. the day before Thanksgiving or the weekend after because every airport is guaranteed to be crammed to bursting with people in transit to, or from, their home town.

Linda Colley

For many on the Right, America is to be routinely celebrated because it stands for free enterprise and global power; for many on the Left, America merits perpetual suspicion and censure for the self-same reasons.

Linda Colley

From the American Revolution right up to the Second World War, the U.S. was more likely to provoke suspicion among members of the British establishment than deferential approval. It was seen - with good cause - not just as a potential rival for empire, but also as dangerously egalitarian, worryingly innovatory, and excessively democratic.

Linda Colley

I write to relieve an intellectual itch. I stumble across a hitherto neglected set of events, transformations, characters, or source materials from the past, and they nag at me until I make sense of them in words. But I also write to seduce and to make my readers think.

Linda Colley

In Britain, British history is naturally a mainstream subject. Step outside your own narrow specialism, and you can find yourself treading on someone else's toes. But in America, British history is an eccentric, minority pursuit, and while this can be intellectually isolating, it also permits extraordinary freedom.

Linda Colley

'Captives' was a deliberate bridging exercise, an attempt to use detailed knowledge of what Britain was like on the inside, to reach a deeper, more variegated understanding of how its peoples experienced external adventures and aggression over a quarter of a millennium in four continents.

Linda Colley

Governments should encourage and facilitate the teaching of history, but one does not want them to be able to dictate, for political or partisan reasons, what kind of history and interpretations are on offer to children.

Linda Colley

I'm struck by how impressively John Elliott assimilated new work on early modern England and colonial America, as well as keeping abreast with his own Hispanic studies, so as to write his recent 'Empires of the Atlantic World.'

Linda Colley

One of the benefits of working outside the U.K. is that I don't have to keep fielding media/politicians' enquiries about 'Britishness' and its ills.

Linda Colley

I don't even know if I'm British any more. I'm transatlantic, I'm European.

Linda Colley

Once you know how completely and suddenly the earth can open up at your feet and the worst can happen, it also, paradoxically, leaves you more afraid of everything else.

Linda Colley

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, products and tastes developed in America have increasingly influenced lifestyles in Europe, whereas in previous centuries, it was generally the other way around.

Linda Colley

Brussels and its multifarious networks provide member states not just with trading access but also a guarantee of regular encounters, negotiations, contacts, informants, and alliances.

Linda Colley

Too close and unthinking an allegiance to Washington has sometimes got British governments into trouble.

Linda Colley

Although England, and the rest of the United Kingdom, possesses momentous constitutional texts and significant statutes, since the 1600s there has been no systematic attempt to codify the powers and limits of the British executive and the rights of those it governs.

Linda Colley

Men and women do not live by bread alone. They also need sustaining ideas.

Linda Colley