Top 100 Quotes About Empires
#1. The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard it ceases to be anything more than 'the gang in possession,' and its days are numbered.
H.G.Wells
#2. 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.
Socrates
#3. The 19th century was a century of empires, the 20th century was a century of nation states. The 21st century will be a century of cities.
Wellington Webb
#4. Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.
Edward Abbey
#6. Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
Milan Kundera
#7. You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.
Doris Lessing
#8. What I am arguing, in effect, is that the full democratic system of the second half of the fifth century B.C. would not have been introduced had there been no Athenian empire.
Moses Finley
#9. ...empires were formed by wars of conquest, but ruled by deception."
The Professor, Hope's great-uncle and the builder of the time-machine.
Eve Human
#10. 5126We are a mongrel race, our past a history of tangles, our sources obscure, our rowdy upbringing full of greedy, short-sighted empires and cruel, wasteful diasporas.
Iain M. Banks
#11. Boy did he hate banks. He told me once that the Founding Fathers worried more about banks than they worried about the British. They knew that banks had been causing chaos, bringing empires to their knees, for centuries, all in the name of free enterprise. Photographer
J.R. Moehringer
#12. The sun never sets on the immense empire of Charles V.
Walter Scott
#13. 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.
Winston Churchill
#14. But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality.
Adam Smith
#15. The emperor is just a man, after all.
Ken Liu
#16. Many kingdoms and empires were in truth little more than large protection rackets. The king was the capo di tutti capi who collected protection money, and in return made sure that neighbouring crime syndicates and local small fry did not harm those under his protection. He did little else.
Yuval Noah Harari
#17. Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!
Iain M. Banks
#19. One of the painfully sobering realizations that come from reading history is the utter incompetence that is possible among leaders of whole nations and empires - and the blind faith that such leaders can nevertheless inspire among the people who are enthralled by their words or their posturing.
Thomas Sowell
#20. That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#22. The allegation of some progressives that America is an evil empire is not simply wrong - it is obscene.
Dinesh D'Souza
#23. But whatever, we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes but at least we have rage and we will build empires with that, gentlemen.
Miriam Toews
#24. God is the ruler of history. His times are well chosen The Roman Empire was an instrument in his hand. And so are the nations of the modern world.
John Gresham Machen
#25. Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.
Albert Camus
#26. The Russian empire under czars and commissars has been hard to deal with for other countries.
Henry A. Kissinger
#27. Great empires are not maintained by timidity.
Tacitus
#28. In the family of continents, Africa is the silent, the brooding sister, courted for centuries by knight-errant empires - rejecting them one by one and severally, because she is too sage and a little bored with the importunity of it all.
Beryl Markham
#29. Have you known how to take rest? You have done more than he who hath taken empires and cities.
Michel De Montaigne
#30. A soil, exhausted by the long culture of Pagan empires, was to lie fallow for a still longer period.
John Lothrop Motley
#31. American influence in the world is certainly considerable, but the United States does not control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other societies, as empires have always done, save for a few special cases that turn out to be the exceptions that prove the rule.
Michael Mandelbaum
#32. Most empires of conquest in history have imposed their own civilisation on the conquered ... By comparison the Mongols trod lightly on the world they conquered.
Jack Weatherford
#33. Jesus is the purest among the mighty, and the mightiest among the pure, who, with his pierced hand has raised empires from their foundations, turned the stream of history from its old channel, and still continues to rule and guide the ages
Jean Paul
#34. The necessity of every one paying in his own labor for what he consumes, affords the only legitimate and effectual check to excessive luxury, which has so often ruined individuals, states and empires; and which has now brought almost universal bankruptcy upon us.
Josiah Warren
#35. If the English had deep-dish pizza they could have kept their empire.
Daniel Pinkwater
#36. There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.
Kevin J. Anderson
#37. Well I've got to get out of the rat-race now I'm tired of the ways of mice and men And the empires all turning into rust again. Out of everything nothing remains the same That's why I'm cloud hidden Cloud hidden Whereabouts unknown.
Van Morrison
#38. Women often come up not knowing how to make decisions. We get wishy-washy. We become great wage earners - breadwinners - but we don't know how to control empires.
Jackee Harry
#39. Humiliation sets armies marching, empires falling, breaks hearts and minds and souls.
Janet Morris
#40. Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#41. Liberals were just as engaged and using the rhetoric of a sort of a battle with the Soviets and with Communism in general, with an evil empire.
Jeff Sharlet
#42. Dyspepsy is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else.
Thomas De Quincey
#43. 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.
Richard Hell
#44. 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.
Kenny Everett
#45. Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark. See how the light needs shadows.
David Mitchell
#46. Everywhere in the world, whether manufacturing, trade or whatever, it is controlled by one apparatus and one policy perspective. Here we have one prime minister with good intentions, and six ministries running their own empires. This creates problems including the import culture.
Baba Kalyani
#47. Strength builds empires that last for decades. Wisdom builds empires that last for centuries. Love builds empires that last forever.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#49. It is fundamental to socialism that we should liquidate the British Empire as soon as we can
Stafford Cripps
#50. The same sand currents had swallowed up and destroyed flourishing cities and great empires. They called it the "sabulation" of the Roman Empire, if he remembered rightly.
Kobo Abe
#51. Comrade [Rafael] Correa gets it right, most of the time. This is new, 'final' offensive of the Empire in Latin America.
Andre Vltchek
#52. Ah, I wager you are most assuredly not useless as a woman, Caecelia.
Sai Marie Johnson
#53. Up the hill, sheep bleat, oblivious to human empires rising and falling.
David Mitchell
#54. Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time.
Arthur C. Clarke
#55. America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home.
Mark Twain
#56. Well then, I will tell you. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and I myself have founded great empires; but upon what did these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon love, and to this very day millions will die for Him ...
Napoleon Bonaparte
#57. One answer to the transitory nature of imperial rule, in short, is that there is a Newtonian third law of empires. The exercise of imperial power generates an opposite and equal reaction among those affected by it, until they so reorganize themselves as to blunt the imperial edge.
Peter Heather
#58. So in Europe, we had empires. Everyone had them - France and Spain and Britain and Turkey! The Ottoman Empire, full of furniture for some reason. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire, famous for fuck all! Yes, all they did was slowly collapse like a flan in a cupboard.
Eddie Izzard
#59. In the end it may well be that Britain will be honored by the historians more for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it.
David Ormsby-Gore, 5th Baron Harlech
#60. The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off.
Benito Mussolini
#61. To make an empire durable, the magistrates must obey the laws and the people the magistrates.
Solon
#62. The history of empires is the history of human misery.
Edward Gibbon
#63. Nature doesn't like empires. It doesn't like accumulation in one place, it doesn't like monoculture. It's always trying to make diverse species. It wants to spread everything out. And we're constantly trying to hold everything in.
Yvon Chouinard
#64. Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor.
Samuel Johnson
#65. To destroy Christianity, we must first destroy the British Empire.
Karl Marx
#66. I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will be fixture enough.
Henry David Thoreau
#67. I have conquered an empire but I have not been able to conquer myself
Peter The Great
#68. Men and women, empires and cities, thrones, principalities, and powers, mountains, rivers, and unfathomed seas, worlds, spaces, and universes, all have their day, and all must go.
H. Rider Haggard
#69. Afghanistan is more than the 'graveyard of empires.' It's the mother of vicious circles.
Maureen Dowd
#70. Commanders and senior officers should die with troops. The honour of the British Empire and the British Army is at stake.
Lord Randolph Churchill
#71. Involved is neither good nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other's pockets ... one becomes involved and it is a long trek back to becoming uninvolved.
Zadie Smith
#72. The naval expansionism of the southern Chola and Pallava empires took Indian influences directly to Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia and Cambodia. Later,
Shashi Tharoor
#73. School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.
Antony Beevor
#74. The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires.
Freeman Dyson
#75. The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen's lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire.
Winston Churchill
#76. Modern empires rise and fall not on armies, ideology, or violence, but on the instantaneous flow of capital. - Boris Karpov
Eric Van Lustbader
#77. 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.
Peter Kuznick
#78. 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.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#79. The story of the fifth century was one of the exploitation of imperial weakness. Thus the Western Empire died.
Adrian Goldsworthy
#80. I've been around long enough to know that empires come and empires go, and I can't tell how long the Google empire is going to last - but I'm pretty convinced that the answer is less than forever.
Mitch Kapor
#81. Empires dissolve and peoples disappear, song passes not away.
William Watson
#82. Children of the future, watching empires fall. Madness the cup they drink from, self destruction the toll.
Ozzy Osbourne
#83. I know men; and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires, and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between Christianity and whatever other religions the distance of infinity ...
Napoleon Bonaparte
#84. Erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries - America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.
Jess Walter
#85. Due to their close cooperation with science, these empires wielded so much power and changed the world to such an extent that perhaps they cannot be simply labelled as good or evil. They created the world as we know it, including the ideologies we use in order to judge them.
Yuval Noah Harari
#86. Nothing is so fragile as thought in its infancy; an interruption breaks it: nothing is so powerful, even to overturning empires, when it reaches its maturity.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#88. And how would he learn his history now? Imagine growing up in a world where only generals and geniuses, empires and companies, had histories, not your own town or grandfather, house or Samantha - none of the things you'd loved.
William H Gass
#89. Lots of science fiction deals with distant times and places. Intrepid prospectors in the Asteroid Belt. Interstellar epics. Galactic empires. Trips to the remote past or future.
Edward M. Lerner
#90. Reason, which is the glory of our nature, is destined eventually, in the progress of future ages, to overturn the empire of superstition.
Elihu Palmer
#91. Charlemagne either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.
Robert Benchley
#92. The Electroshock Novelist: The Alluring Bad Boy of Literary England Has Always Been Fascinated by Britain's Dustbin Empire. Now Martin Amis Takes On American Excess,
Sam Tanenhaus
#93. You must not deprive the colonies of their right to make laws for themselves. Parliament should only make laws necessary for the empire as a whole.
Thomas Hutchinson
#94. Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.
Eduardo Galeano
#95. A thought no less than a thing, an idea equally with an empire, is resolved into a complex of infinitely extensive relations between infinitesimally small parts.
Sangharakshita
#96. The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes; and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.
Francis Bacon
#97. A time is one's own, Eva, when oneself and one's peers take the same things for granted, without thinking about it. Likewise, a man is ruined when the times change but he does not. Permit me to add, empires fall for the same reason.
David Mitchell
#98. I have often before now been convinced that a democracy is incapable of empire ...
Thucydides
#100. It is not in the entrails of doves that the fall of empires can be read, but in the breeding of secrets and the multiplication of lies.
Rod Duncan
