Quotes About The Roman Empire

#1. Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities - in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church.

Nancy Pearcey

#2. If overconfidence can cause the Roman Empire to fall, I ought to be able to get a ground ball.

Dan Quisenberry

#3. I'm sure back in the Greek days or the Roman Empire days, when guys fought in arenas and were fighting lions, people were talking smack. Every era in history has someone talking smack. No way you can have talent and not proclaim your victory.

J. B. Smoove

#4. Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.

Jared Diamond

#5. The union of the Roman empire was dissolved; its genius was humbled in the dust; and armies of unknown barbarians, issuing from the frozen regions of the North, had established their victorious reign over the fairest provinces of Europe and Africa.

Edward Gibbon

#6. Perhaps Western civilization is in a post-decline phase, or maybe the decline is just taking a really long time, like the Roman Empire's did. The Romans had gladiators and Christian-hungry lions and that sort of thing. We have MTV.

Tom Shales

#7. He sat there all through a history lesson about the Roman Empire, which
having lived in the Roman Empire, for the four hundred years during which it had included the British Isles
he found inaccurate and boring.

Susan Cooper

#8. God did not choose Herod or Pontius Pilate or Caesar Augustus as His instrument. He chose the unknown son of an unknown carpenter in one of the least important stretches of the Roman Empire.

Dan Simmons

#9. The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads ... the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the air age we were powerful because we had airplaines. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#10. Today, on our own turf, we face pagan ignorance about God every bit as deep as that which the early church faced in the Roman Empire.

J.I. Packer

#11. 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.

Garrison Keillor

#12. To break up the Roman Empire and to give a new order to the world is the first and principle historical task of the Germans.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#13. We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word ... Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests. Finally, they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#14. Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?

Peter Greenaway

#15. The Roman Empire was very, very much like us. They lost their moral core, their sense of values in terms of who they were. And after all of those things converged together, they just went right down the tubes very quickly.

Ben Carson

#16. Like other systems in decay, the Roman Empire continued to function for several generations after its vitality was sapped. For nearly a hundred years our Island was one of the scenes of conflict between a dying civilisation and lusty, famishing barbarism.

Winston Churchill

#17. The true key to the declension of the Roman empire which is not to be found in all Gibbon 's immense work may be stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#18. No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that 'The Selfish Gene' on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents.

Richard Dawkins

#19. If I'd lived in Roman times, I'd have lived in Rome. Where else? Today America is the Roman Empire and New York is Rome itself.

John Lennon

#20. On Earth, God has placed no more than two powers, and as there is in Heaven but one God, so is there here one Pope and one Emperor. Divine providence has specially appointed the Roman Empire to prevent the continuance of schism in the Church.

Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor

#21. When we look at these types of things it echoes to lessons we haven't learned from the past. We still don't see Rome as a negative thing; we glorify the Roman Empire. It was a fascist state under the control of an incredibly authoritarian militant pre-emptive striking genocidal regime.

Immortal Technique

#22. Christianity is a lie, and possibly the best one ever constructed because aside from architecture, it is all that survives from the Roman Empire.

Alejandro C. Estrada

#23. People came into the Church in the Roman Empire because the Church was so good-Catholics were so good to one another, and they were so good to pagans, too. High-pressure evangelization strikes me as an attempt to deprive people of their freedom of choice.

Andrew Greeley

#24. The world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation.

James Buchan

#25. Europe is like the Roman Empire - indulged, decadent, flooded with immigrants and unprepared to fight for its culture.

Filip Dewinter

#26. 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.

Romano Prodi

#27. 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.

Terence McKenna

#28. All comparisons between America's current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the Roman Empire.

Donald Kagan

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

Peter Jennings

#30. [Instead] of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.

Edward Gibbon

#31. His [Andy warhol] films were way ahead of the times ... and I'm not suggesting this has all necessarily been a good thing for America, mind you. I kind of think we're all in a really big mess, kind of like the end days of the Roman Empire.

Bob Colacello

#32. I'm really enamored with the idea of a reformed society, and I've always been fascinated with the Dark Ages as well as the power vacuum that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.

Victoria Aveyard

#33. There were as many Jews as Greeks in the Roman empire, and a higher proportion of them were literate.

Paul Johnson

#34. There's only one reason to be crucified under the Roman Empire, and that is for treason or sedition. Crucifixion, we have to understand, was not actually a form of capital punishment for Rome. In fact, it was often the case that the criminal would be killed first and then crucified.

Reza Aslan

#35. 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

Mike Tyson

#36. Such is life in the Roman Empire, which has begun its slow decline into ruin. There is little justice or nobility among

Bill O'Reilly

#37. [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.

Edward Gibbon

#38. In retrospect, the highlight of dating him had been free coffee and a particularly compelling discussion on the fall of the Roman Empire.

Richelle Mead

#39. 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'?

Abraham Kuyper

#40. 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

#41. The very word virus began as a contradiction. We inherited the word from the Roman Empire, where it meant, at once, the venom of a snake or the semen of a man. Creation and destruction in one word.

Carl Zimmer

#42. Part of what is wrong with the view of American imperialism is that it is antithetical to our interests. We are better off when people are governing themselves. I'm sure there is some guy that will tell you that philosophy is no different from the Roman Empire's. Well, it is fundamentally different.

Paul Wolfowitz

#43. The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.

Dave Barry

#44. 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.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali

#45. Edward Gibbon, in his classic work on the fall of the Roman Empire, describes the Roman era's declension as a place where bizarreness masqueraded as creativity.

Edward Gibbon

#46. It is no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made.

Neel Burton

#47. The Roman Empire, born out the Roman Republic, with its ideas of democracy among a certain group of wealthy men (no vote for men without land -as with our Founding Fathers- and certainly no vote for women and slaves. Why are democracies built on top of one form of slavery or another?)

Tina Packer

#48. 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

#49. In Italy, on the breaking up of the Roman Empire, society might be said to be resolved into its original elements, - into hostile atoms, whose only movement was that of mutual repulsion.

Edward Everett

#50. If you look at any institution in history - look at the Roman Empire - anything in history, and what it looks like when it's peaking. Look at Apple, and how can you say it's not peaking? ... The thing is, it may take another year or two before it starts to decline, but it has to - everything does.

Trip Hawkins

#51. My last days at MGM were like the fall of the Roman Empire in fast motion.

Joseph Barbera

#52. Wine, like sex, was an immanent divine force, and the wash of its warm ecstasy was experienced as a communion with Dionysus. It is hard for us to appreciate the invisible but ubiquitous effects of wine in the Roman Empire.

Kyle Harper

#53. Our nation will prosper or decline in direct proportion to our selection of leaders who are guided by the Holy Spirit. If we fail to select Godly leaders our destiny will surely be as that of the Roman Empire.

Ronald Reagan

#54. I got to thinking about the Book of Revelation that was written by a Jewish prophet who was also a follower of Jesus who hated the Roman Empire. I realized that the Book of Revelation could be a way to reflect on the issue of religion's relationship to politics.

Elaine Pagels

#55. The eastern part of the Roman Empire spoke mostly Greek, and the western parts spoke mostly Latin. So very soon, you begin getting different emphases between the Eastern church and the Western church.

Justo L. Gonzalez

#56. If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption, or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they espouse.

Cory Booker

#57. The Roman Empire came to an end, but the Roman people didn't come to an end, so I see the American Empire coming to an end just as other empires have come to an end.

Howard Zinn

#58. I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.

Richard Flanagan

#59. Washington ... has become an alien city-state that rules America, and much of the rest of the world, in the way that Rome ruled the Roman Empire.

Richard J. Maybury

#60. A citizen of the Roman Empire, for example, would have placed less value on individual liberty in the modern Western sense than on collective responsibility.

Stephen Baxter

#61. I've been listening to how the Roman Empire fell and all I can say is, it didn't fall nearly fast enough!-Iggy

James Patterson

#62. As we all know from the Roman empire, big empires go down if the borders are not well-protected.

Mark Rutte

#63. The United States as a whole is larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion.

Thomas Sowell

#64. For what fortress, what city, in the wide extent of the Roman empire, can hope to exist, secure and impregnable, if it is our pleasure that it should be erased from the earth?

Attila The Hun

#65. The United States is now relearning an ancient lesson, dating back to the Roman Empire. Brutalizing an enemy only serves to brutalize the army ordered to do it. Torture corrodes the mind of the torturer.

James Risen

#66. The Roman Empire, Vikings, British, Spanish, Portuguese,... all raped women, but it always seems worse when done to us.

Daniel Marques

#67. People think that, that conversion to Judaism is just a modern phenomenon. But there was an era in the late Roman Empire Judaism was not a proselytizing religion. It didn't go out looking for converts, but it accepted converts.

Susan Jacoby

#68. We still haven't gotten the message; we still don't see that it's bad. And then we copy everything about their [Roman Empire] structure. I mean Paul Bremer was the proconsul of Iraq. We're still using ancient terminology, we still have Senators and we have an Emperor, almost.

Immortal Technique

#69. The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.

Thomas Hobbes

#70. There is no indication that any church official suggested or supported the emperor's action against gay people. On the contrary, the only persons known by name to have been punished for homosexual acts were prominent bishops.

John Boswell

#71. The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.

Edward Gibbon

#72. The Rome he has been trained to serve, the Rome of Augustus and Germanicus, was gone. In its place stood Neronopolis, ruled by a megalomaniac brat.

James Romm

#73. Three hundred years after its appearance Christianity was the recognized state religion in the Roman World Empire, and in barely sixty years socialism has won itself a position which makes its victory absolutely certain.

Friedrich Engels

#74. America is the new Roman Empire. Remember what happened to Rome.

Eddie Izzard

#75. Protestant churches everywhere are gravitating toward union with the Roman Catholic Church. These religious movements are speeding the fulfillment of the prophecies of the resurrected Roman Empire. For 30 years I have been proclaiming this tremendous event over the air and in print,

Herbert W. Armstrong

#76. The global empire being forged before our eyes is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group. Much like the Late Roman Empire, it is ruled by a multi-ethnic elite, and is held together by a common culture and common interests.

Yuval Noah Harari

#77. The Romans were a strong power before Virgil, but the Greeks had captured their imaginations. While Rome conquered physical Greece, Greek mythology had enveloped Rome. The Empire coul be confident in itself until a Roman poet matched Homer and harmonized Greek civilization with Roman ideals

John Mark Reynolds

#78. Every new increase in the vast imperial organism seemed to me an unsound growth, like a cancer or dropsical edema which would eventually cause our death.

Marguerite Yourcenar

#79. I had always thought, for 'Roman Empire,' I would love to do the death of Marcus Aurelius in the snow. One morning I woke up, and it was really snowing.

Anthony Mann

#80. Good clothes, when put to the test, survive a change in fortune, as a Roman arch survives the luxury of departed empire.

Arnold Bennett

#81. I am not carrying on a war of extermination against the Romans. I am contending for honor and empire. My ancestors yielded to Roman valour. I am endeavouring that others, in their turn, will be obliged to yield to my good fortune, and my valour.

Hannibal

#82. The first thing that happened was that Helen became an invalid - we know now that there was nothing wrong with her, but Livilla had given her the choice of taking to her bed as if she were ill or taking to her bed because she was ill.

Robert Graves

#83. But the line of thought that I'd been chasing for several days was implicit in the ruins of the old Roman Empire, which gradually destroyed itself by substituting the faith in a legion of miraculous words for the strength of armies and the weight of walls.

Lewis H. Lapham

#84. The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

Voltaire

#85. It was a mystery why the army bothered with a signal communication system when its men were so good at gossip.

Ruth Downie

#86. The Church was spread throughout the entire Roman Empire before a single book of the New Testament was written.

Fulton J. Sheen

#87. A man who had the legions of the east marching at his back could be bred by a donkey on a mule and the senate would have no choice but to accept him.

M.C. Scott

#88. 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

#89. The division of the Roman world between the sons of Theodosius marks the final establishment of the empire of the East, which, from the reign of Arcadius to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, subsisted one thousand and fifty-eight years in a state of premature and perpetual decay.

Edward Gibbon

#90. So much for the Emperor; the rest of this history must deal with the Monster.
- IV:22

Suetonius

#91. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: 'Come back with your shield or on it.' Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome ... (but not before it created an Empire that changed the world -EM).

Robert A. Heinlein

#92. If the teachings of the early Christians changed Rome and the entire Roman Empire, we can't point to any great change that the teachings coming from our pulpits today are producing upon our world in general

Sunday Adelaja

#93. A little knowledge would unlock the gates to vast and unsuspected gates of ignorance.

Ruth Downie

#94. There is an obvious connection, on the declining Roman empire's bread and circuses model, between political enthusiasm for public spectacles and the periods when we are least able to pay for them.

Iain Sinclair

#95. 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.

Ishmael Reed

#96. Charlemagne either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.

Robert Benchley

#97. The ISI may well be Pakistan's answer to the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy, Roman nor an empire: it

Shashi Tharoor

#98. The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. Discuss.

Mike Myers

#99. Julius Caesar was one of the thirty-four Roman emperors (out of the total of forty-nine that reigned until the division of the empire) who were killed by guards, high officials, or members of their own families.

Steven Pinker