Quotes About Empire

Russia can be either an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both. . . . Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.

The best, most solid place to stand as you look at our present situation is on a foundation of history. The Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the Nazi empire all have things in common.

To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.

I call that mind free which protects itself against the usurpations of society, and which does not cower to human opinion: Which refuses to be the slave or tool of the many or of the few, and guards its empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world.

It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire - different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless.

The spread of democracy is a wonderful thing-it is a necessary foundation for peace-and it can happen. But it cannot be advanced by force, and still less by the creation of a new empire, an idea that is as unworkable as it morally mistaken. Empire, the embodiment of force, violates equity on a global scale. No lover of freedom can give it support. It is especially contrary to the founding principles of the United States.

Both the Eurozone and European Union is like the end of the Roman Empire. It's already started. In a few years' time it will not be there anymore. Don't ask me if it will be two years or ten years but the end is near. Like the Roman Empire, it's gone.

One would have thought that if there was one cause in the world which the Conservative party would have hastened to defend, it would be the cause of the British Empire in India ... Our fight is hard. It will also be long ... But win or lose, we must do our duty. If the British people are to lose their Indian Empire, they shall do so with their eyes open.

Seventeen years after its intial release, The Empire Strikes Back is still as thrilling and involving as ever. Because of the high quality of the original product, it doesn't show a hint of dating. Neither [Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope nor Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi] were able to match the narrative scope of Empire, which today remains one of the finest and most rousing science fiction tales ever committed to the screen.

People [in US] are starting to rethink this idea of empire, this idea of the United States being this superpower, the hegemon, is not working, and we can't afford it anymore.

This is not the colonial empire that somehow he has in his hand. I’ve never felt that from him. I felt that from [George] W [Bush]. I felt that from [Bill] Clinton. I felt that from every American president, including ones I disagreed with, including [Jimmy] Carter. I don’t feel that from President Obama.

The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.

People like me start organizing conferences and editing journals, even become tenured professors talking about Empire of the Senseless with a bunch of wide-eyed kids from the farmland. If only one of those kids goes back home and lets her hogs out of the pen to go plum wild rolling around in their own slop while the neighboring farmers scratch their chins, then, isn't that worth it? Insert the same scenario with stockbrokers, stock-car drivers, and stock characters in the post-baccalaureate working man's sideshow, and well, that's viral reproduction.

I didn't know how to be any other way. I felt like one of those barbarian kings just coming to conquer the Roman Empire.

If the British Empire is fated to pass from life into history, we must hope it will not be by the slow process of dispersion and decay, but in some supreme exertion for freedom, for right and for truth.

If you are an American Muslim, you live in a community that is really struggling to get its feet off the ground. We're a very young community, so to speak, institutionally and otherwise. The way in which we're portrayed it's like we're the empire from Star Wars and the truth is that we'd be lucky to be the Rebel Alliance.

I don't take investment advice from wealth managers. I have grown several businesses from scratch and amassed many millions from my publishing empire - why would I take advice from someone who has never experienced that?

[The Persian Empire] left a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together.

Eddie Fisher married to Elizabeth Taylor is like me trying to wash the Empire State Building with a bar of soap.

Moreover it is becoming the Britons, whether scientific or unscientific, who boast at all fitting occasions of their aptitude to rule the waves, should know something of the population of their saline empire, especially of those parts of it immediately in contact with their terrestrial domain, and the coasts of the Continent to which our United Kingdom appertains.

Men do not rest content with parrying the attacks of a superior, but often strike the first blow to prevent the attack being made. And we cannot fix the exact point at which our empire shall stop; we have reached a position in which we must not be content with retaining but must scheme to extend it, for, if we cease to rule others, we are in danger of being ruled ourselves. Nor can you look at inaction from the same point of view as others, unless you are prepared to change your habits and make them like theirs.

I'm building my adult beverage empire the way I built my independent rap label. As my career.

You can shoot a film in New York without seeing the Empire State Building. Or Starbucks...although the latter is much less realistic.

Nothing lasts forever, whether it's Greece, Rome or the British Empire. It doesn't mean that America has to end. The country could be reshaped and reimagined in a way that is even more democratic and less imperial in nature. We're trying to radically reshape the nation in ways that are more just and fairer. That's what I mean when I say that empires eventually fall. I'm not calling for the end of America. I'm just calling for a reimagination of its democratic possibilities.

Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.

I turned down the OBE because its not a club you want to join when you look at the villains whove got it. Its all the things I think are despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest.

The perfection preached in the gospels never yet built an empire. Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning.

The transformations of the French empire itself or of French power structures themselves as well as the emergence of a kind of language of equal rights starting with the American Revolution and the French Revolution provided an opportunity and in some ways connected with other kinds of ground level desires or hopes and ideologies for freedom that were coming out of the plantation regime itself.

We live in an age of apologies. Apologies, fake or true, are expected from the descendants of empire builders, slave owners and persecutors of heretics, and from men who -in our eyes- just got it all wrong. So, with the age of 85 coming up shortly, I want to make an apology. It appears I must apologize for being male, white, and European.

The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism

A great empire and little minds go ill together.

America is the strongest empire ever, with the largest military. We spend ten times what the Russians do. And they have equal nuclear ability as we do, because they're precise.

It lies upon the people's shoulders to prepare for the war, but it lies upon the Israeli army to carry out the fight with the ultimate object of erecting the Israeli Empire.

Putin wants to reestablish Russian greatness, not as the Cold War, but in 19th century empire terms.

The Romanovs are overtaken by the Indian Maharajahs as American heiresses pick over the carcasses of fallen Empire.

Revisiting the Revolutionary War is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape of the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few Americans defying an empire.

... the reason is that a military defeat of Britain will bring about the disintegration of the British Empire. This would not be of any benefit to Germany.

The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity — a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.

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.

Build your empire on the firm foundation of the fundamentals.

It was on this day that the Bahamas declared independence. Before that they were a British colony. The British Empire lost Canada and the Bahamas, to name just a couple. Britain's been dumped more times than Taylor Swift. But did they go writing whining songs about it? No.

I received an OBE from the Queen, which probably doesn't mean anything in America but is quite nice in England - the Order of the British Empire for services to drama.

Most Americans are aware of the brutality and injustice used to maintain the excesses of their selfish consumer society and empire. Yet I suspect...they do not care. They don’t want to see what is done in their name. They do not want to look at the rows of flag-draped coffins, the horribly maimed bodies and faces of veterans, or the human suffering in the blighted and deserted former manufacturing centers. It is too upsetting. Government and corporate censorship is therefore welcomed and appreciated.

Freud's theory was that when a joke opens a window and all those bats and bogeymen fly out, you get a marvellous feeling of relief and elation. The trouble with Freud is that he never had to play the old Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night after Rangers and Celtic had both lost.

In the late 1930s, both the British and American movie industries made a succession of films celebrating the decency of the British Empire in order to challenge the threatening tide of Nazism and fascism and also to provide employment for actors from Los Angeles's British colony. The best two were Hollywood's Gunga Din and Britain's The Four Feathers...

For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

When you build a big empire, you become the persona that people think they know. So when you try to show them who you are, to help them discover you, they just want what they think they know about you. I would have been smarter to build some relationships when I was younger, a private love or something. Today it is more difficult. But it's the price to pay. I never regret anything, because every choice I made for a reason, but I'd love personal love.

I made 'Empire of the Sun' in Shanghai in the 1980s and want to come back one day to make a movie in China.