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.

We better rethink the position of the United States in the world and whether we want to be an empire. Being an empire puts all of us in jeopardy. The American Empire, while it was just wreaking havoc on other nations, didn't bother us.

I have done many impious things--no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes.

Once I spoke about this subject among a group of English intellectuals. One of them was a professor on Roman Law at one of the leading British universities. I asked him,what was the official language of the Byzantine Empire? He said, maybe sometime in the sixth or the seventh century.The Justinian Codex, the rule of law in the Byzantine Empire which was produced by Emperor Justinian, it was written in Latin.And he looked at me ,he knew that I knew already that the only original copy was found in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

In fact, when the fires of empire get hidden, they still stay burning underneath the moss, seething away. This is true with a lot of the countries with really difficult, impenetrable nationalist movements - countries that once had a big empire, like Turkey, England, or even in Italy, with the fascists in the middle of the last century. People who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway.

A good library at home is a giant empire inside the house.

The liberty of the press would be an empty sound, and no man would venture to write on any subject, however, pure his purpose, without an attorney at one elbow and a counsel at the other. From minds thus subdued by the fear of punishment, there could issue no works of genius to expand the empire of human reason.

My arguments for liberal empire or whatever you want to call it - hegemony, primacy, you name it - are really activated by a sense that the alternatives involve more violence, more repression, more hardship.

I am utterly struck how, 300 years after his execution, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

I'd signed up not just for Christianity but the established Church of England. That has a particular history and I think we rather lost it in the 19th Century, we became so much part of empire and colonialism, the language of the Church Of England still reflects that Victorian time. As the 20th Century developed, not surprisingly people left the church and I can see the church's role in losing people.

[The] penalty of death was abolished in the Roman empire, a law of mercy most delightful to the humane theorist, but of which the practice, in a large and vicious community, is seldom consistent with the public safety.

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.

In trading with each other cities can't be in too different stages of development, and they can't copy one another. Backward cities, or younger cities, or newly forming cities in supply regions, have to develop to a great extent on one another's shoulders. This is one of the terrible things about empires. Empires want them only to trade with the empire, which doesn't help them at all. It's just a way of exploiting them.

Can't' will be the epitaph of the British Empire - unless we wake up in time.

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.

One basic formula for understanding the Community is this: 'Take five broken empires, add the sixth one later, and make one big neo-colonial empire out of it all.'

Before the birth of Love, many fearful things took place through the empire of necessity; but when this god was born, all things rose to men.

No good government but what is republican... the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'

In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . . Let’s not go there.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks, before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman empire.

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

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems Omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

It's clear that when we're this outnumbered by the creatures, we have to take a page from the British Empire and rule the lesser species through intimidation. That's why the single most important thing you can do as a human is to dominate an animal. Need more proof?Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground. I'd say that about covers it.

We have decided to bring to an end the most unequal, most unjust, most barbarous war of our age, and have chosen the road to exile in order that our people will not be exterminated and in order to consecrate ourselves wholly and in peace to the preservation of our empire's independence.

When England was a kingdom, we had a king. When we were an empire, we had an emperor. Now we're a country, and we have Margaret Thatcher.

America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home.

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

Women, rouse yourselves! The tocsin of reason resounds through the whole universe: recognize your rights. The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudices, fanaticism, superstition and lies.

Strengthen an adversary led by a dictator who dreams of reassembling the old Soviet empire? What an extraordinarily dangerous lack of judgment.

He had a heart that could have held the entire empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar.

It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind.

You saw Britain back in the early days of sailing ships. They were the sea power, the controlled the seas and they had colonies all over the world and then you can look at history and watch the way that their empire kind of crumbled. I certainly don't want that to happen to the United States in space technology.

Nothing like this has been attempted before. (...) It might be called a literary Porto Alegre. That implies a beginning, with much fierce argument and discussion to come. But whatever the outcome of ensuing criticisms or objections, The World Republic of Letters -- empire more than republic, as Casanova shows -- is likely to have the same sort of liberating impact at large as Said's Orientalism, with which it stands comparison.

We must now face the difficult task of moving towards a single economy, a single political entity .. For the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire we have the opportunity to unite Europe.

The future of Cuba is one earned by a country that has resisted for over 50 years against the most powerful empire on Earth. The resilience of its people made this triumph materialize.

When Marcus Garvey died in 1940, the role of the British Empire was already being challenged by India and the rising expectations of her African colonies. Marcus Garvey's avocation of African redemption and the restoration of the African state's sovereign political entity in world affairs was still a dream without fulfillment.

Ron Swanson is more than the MVP of the 'Parks and Recreation' squad, more than just the funniest character on TV - he's the perfect depiction of aggrieved American manhood at the twilight of the empire.

The Ottoman Empire whose sick body was not supported by a mild and regular diet, but by a powerful treatment, which continually exhausted it.

The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth.

It is with literature as with law or empire - an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession.

Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself.

We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night: the precise moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say: 'You are now entering Imperium.' Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history was saying: 'Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing may be irreversible.' And now, not far ahead, is a sign that reads: 'No U-turns.'

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

we still have the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building and the Woolworth Building, but it just seems like part of the nature of New York, that it's always shifting.

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

I set out with a perfect distrust of my own abilities, a total renunciation of every speculation of my own, and with a profound reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors, who have left us the inheritance of so happy a Constitution and so flourishing an empire, and, what is a thousand times more valuable, the treasury of the maxims and principles which formed the one and obtained the other.

I have one of the strongest records in fighting for senior citizens. I led the effort to prevent cuts to Social Security. But I think for some seniors, they remember the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union. They conflated the term "democratic socialism" with communism.