Quotes About Empire

I think it's important to realise that what happens in Neo-Platonism beginning with Plotinus and Porphyry and then going on for the next several centuries, is a real kind of contest for the ideas and convictions of the intelligentsia of the later Roman Empire. So that you have Christians slowly converting more and more powerful people until of course actually Constantine and then other emperors after him, become Christian, and the empire becomes a Christian empire rather than Pagan empire.

In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo.

We cannot forget that we live and have been living for many years in the midst of an empire. We cannot forget that the different provinces of India are gradually coming closer to one another and a new nationality which comprises not only the different provinces but the whole of India is growing up in our midst and we cannot forget that our interests, even our selfish interests, our hopes, our ambitions are indissolubly connected with the interest of the empire.

The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.

Human beings can be redeemed. Empires cannot. Our refusal to face the truth about empire, our refusal to defy the multitudinous crimes and atrocities of empire, has brought about the nightmare Malcolm predicted. And as the Digital Age and our post-literate society implant a terrifying historical amnesia, these crimes are erased as swiftly as they are committed.

The problem is Russia is a country that has lost 300 years of its history, in terms of most of what was part of the Russian Empire in Europe, towards Europe, since Peter the Great, has been the territory that is no longer under Russian rule.

The fate of the Empire rests on this enterprise. Every man must devote himself totally to the task in hand.

As is always the case with American presidential elections, nobody's talking about the fact that the empire will be ruled from Washington, and foreign policy has just not been on anybody's screen, unfortunately.

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.

The descendants of Holy Roman Empire monarchies became feeble-minded in the twentieth century, and after World War I had been done in by the democracies; some were kept on to entertain the tourists, like the one they have in England.

Even while Jerusalem was standing and the Jews were at peace with us, the practice of their sacred rites was at variance with the glory of our empire, the dignity of our name, the customs of our ancestors.

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

America is an empire in decay. But we don't have to lash out and do damage on the way down. We can reverse some of the damage we've done. It's possible.

There's nothing routine about 'Boardwalk Empire.' It's like being in some secret society where they call you up and tell you where to go: 'Meet us at the corner of such and so.'

Ferguson argued that British involvement in World War I was unnecessary, far too costly in lives and money for any advantage gained, and a Pyrrhic victory that in many ways contributed to the end of the Empire.

During the first six years of my life, Hungary was one of the most important components of the Habsburg dynasty's vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, but after World War I it became an independent national entity.

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 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.

I am leading a war against the British Empire. I'm not worried about what Democratic Party hacks say or do.

So you can't live in Manhattan?' she asked. Amos's brow furrowed as he looked across at the Empire State Building. 'Manhattan has other problems. Other gods. It's best we stay separate.

When I was thirteen, I had a nervous breakdown, and I was put into this grown-up mental hospital with all these 50-, 60-year-old men and women. This big, Victorian mental house. There were like five boys in there, all my age, looked after by this woman who was 22 or 23. And it was like "Empire of the Sun" meets "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"-type of arrangement where you've got this young boy overcoming and becoming heroic in the face of this awful place.

These two great organisations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some affairs for mutual and general advantage. I do not view the process with any misgivings. I could not stop it if I wished. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands, and better days.

I see a New York that is once again the empire state.

We do not seek the unanimity that comes to those who water down all issues to the lowest common denominator - or to those who conceal their differences behind fixed smiles - or to those who measure unity by standards of popularity and affection, instead of trust and respect. We are allies. This is a partnership, not an empire. We are bound to have differences and disappointments - and we are equally bound to bring them out into the open, to settle them where they can be settled, and to respect each other's views when they cannot be settled.

If monarchy is corrupting - and it is - wait till you see what overt empire does to us.

Рow can we be, even if it is the last day on earth? It's like Christmas Eve. "Okay, it's going to be Christmas. So what. What are you going to do? Jump off the Empire State Building?" It's all still the same. The last day of your life is still going to be a day. Then there's that thing, maybe it's not true. Who knows? Are you going to believe it? Are you going to buy it? There are a lot of other things that are important, you know. You know what they say. Life is what happens when you're doing other things, right?

America is a Nation with a mission - and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace - a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.

Christianity began with 120 in the Upper Room, within three centuries it had become the predominant religion of the Roman Empire. What brought this about? The answer is deceptively simple, while Christianity was being presented to unbelievers in both Word and deed, it was the deed that far exceeded the Word in evangelistic effectiveness.

Long before the empire had reached its greatest extent, the Romans were bored by it.

Portugal is not doing well economically. People are upset and angry. You can feel it on the street. You can tell in the way they drive. We're talking about one of the richest histories. We had an unbelievable empire, and so many maritime discoveries, and how is it that we are now reduced to this? But I still love the country.

... the connection between imperial politics and culture is astonishingly direct. American attitudes to American "greatness", to hierarchies of race, to the perils of "other" revolutions (the American revolution being considered unique and somehow unrepeatable anywhere else in the world) have remained constant, have dictated, have obscured, the realities of empire, while apologists for overseas American interests have insisted on American innocence, doing good, fighting for freedom.

I recognize no empire of this present age.

I do not know whether this universe has an emperor; all I know is that this empire is in chaos; universal order is a big delusion.

When it was over my daughter said, 'Oh, I felt so sorry for him - he didn't want to hurt you, he liked you.' That was Victoria. When you visualize him up there on top of the Empire State Building, you do feel sorry for him.

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.

Utterly absorbing.... If you did not have the opportunity to witness the Soviet empire in its death throes, Lenin's Tomb will take you there.

Most Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.

It's hard to imagine a more potent sign of a weak, declining empire than having one's national 'credibility' depend upon periodically bombing other countries.

In order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets. [...] The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question.

The whole Turkish empire is nothing else but a crust cast by Heaven's great Housekeeper to His dogs.

I'm still a member of the Empire! Although I sometimes feel like an American with a British accent - you get contaminated after so long.

Christianity stamped its character on jurisprudence; for empire has ever a connection with the priesthood.

I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war in Afghanistan, unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Didn't you have any sadistic nannies who told you these tales to keep you quiet and well behaved at night? Heavens, what's to become of the Empire if governesses have lost their touch for scaring the wits out of their girls?

Teaching boys to bake cakes? That's no way to maintain an industrial empire.

Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers. This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.