Quotes About Empire

The United States is now The Empire. There isn't an empire; there's The Empire, and that empire is the United States.

Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well-known examples that they do not need citing; 2) excessive ambition, such as Athens' attempted conquest of Sicily in the Peloponnesian War, Philip II's of England via the Armada, Germany's twice-attempted rule of Europe by a self-conceived master race, Japan's bid for an empire of Asia; 3) incompetence or decadence, as in the case of the late Roman empire, the last Romanovs and the last imperial dynasty of China; and finally 4) folly or perversity.

Alexander, Charlemagne and myself all tried to found an empire on force and we failed. Jesus Christ is building an empire on love, and today there are millions of people who would gladly die for His sake.

Everyone outside the Roman Empire was called a barbarian. Everyone outside Obama’s empire is called a terrorist.

The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, the United Nations is a disunited collection of regimes, many of which do not represent the nations they govern.

The Empire of Wisdom is the only empire on which the sun never sets!

You can actually muck with history and think about what if, why not. What if there were dragons in the Incan Empire that allowed them to resist colonization? What if there were a massive dragon empire in the middle of the interior of southern Africa that decided to take objection to the slave trade?

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.

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

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan... We will gain the inevitable triumph so help us God.

Truth is a queen who has her eternal throne in heaven, and her seat of empire in the heart of God.

After 'The Empire Strikes Back,' I got to make big films that I didn't care about, 'Never Say Never Again' and 'RoboCop 2,' and then I got too old.

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.

I come from a very left wing Socialist family, anti-war and anti-empire.

There is no connection between imperialism and democracy. I mean when we ran an Empire which we did when I was born, there was no democracy anywhere.

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.

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.'

This is the deadening consensus that crosses party lines, that dominates our major media, and that is strangling the liberty and prosperity that were once the birthright of Americans. Dissenters who tell their fellow citizens what is really going on are subject to smear campaigns that, like clockwork, are aimed at the political heretic. Truth is treason in the empire of lies.

I've said it would have to be our Empire Strikes Back for me to come back and for me to pull the whole team back together. I think we do have that idea. We do have the idea that feels big and really blows the doors off this franchise. It's hinted at promises of something for two movies now, for thirty years, so it's time to deliver on that.

The "can do" logic, by its own nature, does not accept limits. And an empire does not have a graceful way to evolve out of this role. History demonstrates this time and again.

The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen's lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire.

I'm a businesswoman who's serious about her money. I want an empire.

Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles places the loyalist experience and the aftermath of the American Revolution in an entirely new light. Alongside the Spirit of 1776, Jasanoff gives us the Spirit of 1783, dedicated to remaking the mighty British Empire, and then offers a stunning reinterpretation of the Loyalists' complicated role in that remaking. Her meticulously researched and superbly written account is historical revision at its finest, and it affirms her place as one of the very finest historians of the rising generation.

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.

They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor… They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.

Man has ruled this world as a stumbling demented child king, long enough. And as his empire crumbles, my precious black widow shall rise as his most fitting successor.

How often has not the parallel been drawn and the golden age of the Roman Empire, when the external brilliancy of life likewise dazzled the eye, notwithstanding that the social diagnosis could yield no other verdict than 'rotten to the very core'?

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.

If all the barbarian conquerors had been annihilated in the same hour, their total destruction would not have restored the empire of the West: and if Rome still survived, she survived the loss of freedom, of virtue, and of honour.

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.

The American empire is hovering between life and death.

...there are two (inter alia) two ways of ruining a society - namely, letting the market "be the sole director of the fate of human beings," and allowing technology to permeate every aspect of our lives. In the United States, both of these developments have converged, creating a huge chasm between rich and poor and pushing us over the edge into a kind of antisociety... While these developments have been widely hailed as the dawn of a golden age, the likelihood is that they actually amount to a death knell, the beginning of the end of the American empire.

Admit at least one painful truth to yourself every day. Teach yourself to feel that life would still be worth living even if you were not immeasurably superior to all your friends. Exercises of this sort, prolonged through several years, will at last enable you to admit facts without flinching, and will, in so doing, free you from the empire of fear over a very large field.

An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of Democracy

Needless to say, they refused to submit to the Empire, conducting such a persistent guerrilla war that the Romans gave up hope of conquering Scotland, and the Wee Free Men remained both wee and free.

I got my first part in Silent Fall, 1994 - I guess I was 15 or 16 - which was really outrageous because I still knew nothing. I don't think I really learned how to land on my marks until after Empire Records in 1995, 'cause sometimes I'll see a shot in that film, and I'm like "Whoa, I just walked over to the corner."

Seldom can two such epoch-making events have occurred in successive years as happened then. In 1453 the Turks stormed Constantinople and finally destroyed the Greek Empire, driving out Greek scholars, who carried the knowledge of Greek language and literature to the western world; and in 1454 the first document known to us appeared from the printing press at Mainz.

I'm interested in Linux because of the technology, and Linux wasn't started as any kind of rebellion against the 'evil Microsoft empire.'

It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.

In England, the population explosion can be linked very clearly with the enclosure of the commons that uprooted the peasants from their land. In India, it was the same thing: the population increased at the end of the 18th century when the British took over and Indian lands were colonized. Instead of the land feeding Indian people it started to feed the British empire. So we had destitution. Destitute people who don't have their own land to feed themselves can only feed themselves by having larger numbers, therefore they multiply. It's the rational response of a dispossessed people.

To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.

I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.

It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself.

It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy; power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy. The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States.

We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.

If the Soviet empire still existed, I'd be terrified. The fact is, we can afford a fairly ignorant presidency now.

It has never occurred to me to wish for empire or royalty, nor for the eminence of those high and commanding fortunes. My aim lies not in that direction; I love myself too well.

Ultimately, I think the United States is a pretty awesome country but it very plausibly would have been even awesomer had English and American political leaders in the late 18th century been farsighted enough to find compromises that would have held the empire together.