Quotes About Imperial Power

#1. How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain's festering,
blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conicts of today.

Arundhati Roy

#2. It is in the nature of imperialism that citizens of the imperial power are always among the last to know-or care-about circumstances in the colonies.

Bertrand Russell

#3. To feel pity, to be carried away by the pleasure of hearing a clever argument, to listen to the claims of decency are three things that are entirely against the interests of an imperial power.

Thucydides

#4. The U.S. should come out openly and say to the world, "We are the only imperial power, and we're going to rule you, and if you don't like it you can lump it."

Tariq Ali

#5. Fundamental systemic crises are often associated with the decline of the dominant imperial power and its increasing inability to sustain the system over which it had previously presided. The profound instability of the interwar period owed much to Britain's inability to maintain its role.

Martin Jacques

#6. Legions and fleets are not such sure bulwarks of imperial power as a numerous family

Tacitus

#7. In the span of a human lifetime, and well within the collective memory, Britain went from a stable imperial power ruling an appreciable fraction of the Earth's surface to being a tumultuous patchwork which was at least superficially in decline.

Nick Harkaway

#8. There's this brutal imperial power, that my passport says I represent. But it will never represent where my heart lives, only vaguely where it went.

Ani DiFranco

#9. Guys like Bin Laden have been responsible for injuring and maiming and murdering more Muslims than any foreign imperial power has in the last hundred years.

Irshad Manji

#10. Certainly, imperial power is never peaceably acquired or maintained.

Pankaj Mishra

#11. 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

#12. How do you have a democratic empire, how do you have an imperial foreign policy built on a democracy polity. It's like some sort of strange mythical beast that's part lion, part dragon. You know at the bottom is a democracy, and then it's an imperial power around the world.

Mark Danner

#13. Let him leave the imperial court, who wishes to be virtuous. Virtue and absolute power cannot coexist.

Lucan

#14. Ever since Constantine made Christianity the official "imperial faith, " Christians have been trying to push the camel of power and wealth through the slender needle's eye of the vision of Jesus.

Kurt Neilson

#15. Goldie was a believer in the imperial project, which is to say, in the civilising power of social progress.

Damon Galgut

#16. Obama is a tyrant the same way FDR was a tyrant. He has a view of presidential power that states: the government is in control of the country, and the president is in charge of the government. He's taken an imperial view of the presidency.

David Mamet

#17. To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.

Michael Mandelbaum

#18. Military power tends to be a function of economic power, and the British Navy was the essential capability for establishing the imperial sway - which was attuned to furnish the raw materials for the British manufacturing ascendance. So they were mutually reinforcing.

Charles R. Morris

#19. The victory of the Church over the power which was embodied in the Roman imperial system was not won by seizing the levers of power: it was won when the victims knelt down in the Colosseum and prayed in the name of Jesus for the Emperor.

Lesslie Newbigin

#20. We are faithful not to the triumphant golden eagle (ironically, also an imperial symbol of power in Rome) but to the slaughtered Lamb.

Shane Claiborne

#21. I really want Congress to do its job, the constitutional power that they have to halt an imperial presidency, to halt this fundamental transformation of America that is making us an unrecognizable mess of a nation at this time.

Sarah Palin

#22. Because of my politics, people think I'm anti-American. But I was quite the reverse. What I don't like about the United States is when the government acts like an old, imperial 18th- or 19th-century European power.

Robert Wyatt

#23. I told him that neither he nor anyone else should ever underestimate the strength and power of the United States: those who had - Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union - were all now in the ashcan of history.

Robert M. Gates