Empires Quotes

1. "For the Greeks, values existed a priori and marked out the exact limits of every action. Modern philosophy places its values at the completion of action. They are not, but they become, and we shall know them completely only at the end of history. When they disappear, limits vanish as well, and since ideas differ as to what these values will be, since there is no struggle which, unhindered by these same values, does not extend indefinitely, we are now witnessing the Messianic forces confronting one another, their clamors merging in the shock of empires. Excess is a fire, according to Heraclitus. The fire is gaining ground; Nietzsche has been overtaken. It is no longer with hammer blows but with cannon shots that Europe philosophizes."
Author: Albert Camus

2. "That is the great mistake about the affections. It is not the rise and fall of empires, the birth and death of kings, or the marching of armies that move them most. When they answer from their depths, it is to the domestic joys and tragedies of life."
Author: Amelia Barr

3. "And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."
Author: C.S. Lewis

4. "When human men hold an object that makes a powerful noise, or has moving parts, or spins around fast, or has a button they can push (which either screws or nails something) they become Gods in their own heads.They can do anything: they can eat through walls and bring buildings together to form mighty empires.They can build floating cities and flying tin cans.But they still can't make their own beds."
Author: Craig Stone

5. "It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile . . . That is not imagination. No, it kills it. . . . Your universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men who collect . . . facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within?"
Author: E.M. Forster

6. "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."
Author: Eduardo Galeano

7. "The history of empires is the history of human misery."
Author: Edward Gibbon

8. "All empires become arrogant. It is their nature."
Author: Edward Rutherfurd

9. "We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies. (p. 5)"
Author: Edward W. Said

10. "How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history—greater than the fall of empires—I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence."
Author: Emil Cioran

11. "The poems turned up everywhere. Soon the lady of the house went into fits of hysteria when she kept discovering this attack of poetry in the most unlikely places—under doors, in the mother-of-pearl latticework of windowpanes, under jars, stones, flowerpots, loaves of bread, and even delivered by homing pigeons, around whose rose-coloured claws the young matador lovingly wound poems in which he declaimed his love in the quaint language whose provenance was unknown to the world and still evoked images of the uninterrupted empires of Visigiths, the unbridled lust of the Huns and the intransigence of the Berbers. The young maiden recognized only a few words, but to her they were fragments of a secret music: zirimiri, fine rain; senaremaztac, husband and wife; nik behar diren guzian eginen ditut, I shall do everything necessary...."
Author: Eric Gamalinda

12. "America is an empire. I hope you know that now. All empires, by definition, are bumbling, shambolic, bullying, bureaucratic affairs, as certain of the rightness of their cause in infancy, as they are corrupted by power in their dotage."
Author: Felix Dennis

13. "Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy."
Author: Frank Herbert

14. "And then what are your plans?" Annwyl frowned. "My plans?" "Yes. Your plans. You take your brother's head, your troops are waiting. What is the next thing that you do?"Annwyl just stared at him. He realized in that instant that the girl had no plans. None. No grand schemes of controlling the world. No plots to destroy any other empires. Not even the plan to have a celebratory dinner."Annwyl, you'll be queen. You'll have to do something." "But I don't want to be queen." Her body shook with panic, and he could hear it in her voice. "You take his head, you'll have little choice.""What the hell am I supposed to do as queen?" "Well . .you could try ruling." "That sounds awfully complicated."
Author: G.A. Aiken

15. "I am naturally a Nordic — a chalk-white, bulky Teuton of the Scandinavian or North-German forests — a Viking berserk killer — a predatory rover of Hengist and Horsa — a conqueror of Celts and mongrels and founders of Empires — a son of the thunders and the arctic winds, and brother to the frosts and the auroras — a drinker of foemen's blood from new picked skulls — a friend of the mountain buzzards and feeder of seacoast vultures — a blond beast of eternal snows and frozen oceans — a prayer to Odin and Thor and Woden and Alfadur, the raucous shouter of Niffelheim — a comrade of the wolves, and rider of nightmares"
Author: H.P. Lovecraft

16. "I stamp out vast empires. I crush palaces in my rigid hands. I harden my heart against churches.I blot out cemetaries. I feed the people with stinging nettles. I resurrect madness. I thrust my naked sword between the ribs of the world. I murder the world!"
Author: Harry Crosby

17. "What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires."
Author: J. Gresham Machen

18. "Jewish and Palestinian nationalism are virtually contemporaneous, and grew out of the disruptions that created new national movements from the ruins of the old empires / i."
Author: Jack Schwartz

19. "Some have called Afghanistan 'the graveyard of empires,' and it probably is the graveyard of empires."
Author: James G. Stavridis

20. "The increase of territory and power of empires by force of arms has been the policy of all great powers, and it has always been possible to get the approval of their state religion."
Author: John Boyd Orr

21. "Though the general principles of statecraft have survived the rise and fall of empires, every increase in knowledge has brought about changes in the political, economic, and social structure."
Author: John Boyd Orr

22. "In the last five or six thousand years, empires one after another have arisen, waxed powerful by wars of conquest, and fallen by internal revolution or attack from without."
Author: John Boyd Orr

23. "A soil, exhausted by the long culture of Pagan empires, was to lie fallow for a still longer period."
Author: John Lothrop Motley

24. "You think so?" The boy looked down at his cross-legged form. He was sitting straight-backed, legs folded neatly in the manner of an Egyptian scribe. "It's two thousand, one hundred and twenty-nine years since Ptolemy died," he said. "He was fourteen. Eight world empires have risen up and fallen away since that day, and I still carry his face. Who do you think's the lucky one?"
Author: Jonathan Stroud

25. "The day of small nations has long passed away. The day of Empires has come."
Author: Joseph Chamberlain

26. "May our land be a land of liberty, the seat of virtue, the asylum of the oppressed, a name and a praise in the whole Earth, until the last shock of time shall bury the empires of the whole world in one common undistinguished ruin!"
Author: Joseph Warren

27. "Jordan has a strange, haunting beauty and a sense of timelessness. Dotted with the ruins of empires once great, it is the last resort of yesterday in the world of tomorrow. I love every inch of it."
Author: King Hussein I

28. "It was an age of Empires. So is this one, not all that well disguised."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

29. "History is made of empires, and the United States was by far and away the greatest, richest, and fairest empire that had every dominated the earth. Inevitably, it would fall. Empires always did. But we were lucky, you said. We got to participate in the most fascinating social experiment ever attempted."
Author: Lionel Shriver

30. "Perhaps his gloom was due to his profession, that he lived among fallen empires, and in reading these languages that had not been spoken by the common man in centuries, he had all about him the ruin of language, evidence of toppled suburbs, grass growing among the mosaics, and voices that had been choked with poison, iron, age, or ash."
Author: M.T. Anderson

31. "Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too."
Author: Marcus Aurelius

32. "Betrayal isn't ridiculous. It's the reason empires fall."
Author: Marisha Pessl

33. "I am also, well… I'm in awe. He's killed people, and saved people. He's fought monsters, and he's fought men who became monsters. He's saved kingdoms and toppled empires. Now he has set himself against the gods to save a universe… and I used to change his diapers. I used to yell at him to make his bed."
Author: Matthew Woodring Stover

34. "All empires fall, eventually." "But why? It's not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those who have known nothing else. Who have no comprehension of the need to rise above base desires.["]"
Author: Max Barry

35. "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."
Author: Michael Mandelbaum

36. "I "love" reading.It makes me feel like I am swallowing up Christ, Homer, Confucius, Newton, Franklin, Socrates, Caesar, and the whole world into one gigantic invincible Sir Moffat. Mine is creative reading. I read building empires in mind. I pray I won't read and read and forget to marry."
Author: Moffat Machingura

37. "Empires collapse, Civilizations disappear, Health deteriorates And bodies turn to ash, But life will always go on"
Author: Mouloud Benzadi

38. "Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost; but in sunlight does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where - even though tomorrow we will die - we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their imminent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now? We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have, we are abandoned at dawn on a field littered with corpses, we are transported until our death by projects that are no sooner completed than they must be renewed. Yet how exhausting it is to be constantly desiring..."
Author: Muriel Barbery

39. "Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him."
Author: Napoleon

40. "The vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works . . . buries empires and cities in a common grave."
Author: Philipp Meyer

41. "I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else. They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy."
Author: Rebecca West

42. "Most of the Bible is a history told by people living in lands occupied by conquering superpowers. It is a book written from the underside of power. It's an oppression narrative. The majority of the Bible was written by a minority people living under the rule and reign of massive, mighty empires, from the Egyptian Empire to the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Empire to the Assyrian Empire to the Roman Empire.This can make the Bible a very difficult book to understand if you are reading it as a citizen of the the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. Without careful study and reflection, and humility, it may even be possible to miss central themes of the Scriptures."
Author: Rob Bell

43. "While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things,The fate of empires and the fall of kings;While quacks of State must each produce his plan,And even children lisp the Rights of Man;Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,The Rights of Woman merit some attention."
Author: Robert Burns

44. "She had the resigned indifference of extreme old age. Buildings and empires rose and fell. It snowed. It stopped snowing. People came and went. One day death would come for her, and she would not find that surprising either, and she would not care -"
Author: Robert Harris

45. "You have perhaps heard some false reportsOn the subject of God. He is not dead; and he is not a fable. He is not mocked nor forgotten--Successfully. God is a lion that comes in the night. God is a hawk gliding among the stars--If all the stars and the earth, and the living flesh of the night that flows in between them, and whatever is beyond themWere that one bird. He has a bloody beak and harsh talons, he pounces and tears--And where is the German Reich? There alsoWill be prodigious America and world-owning China. I say that all hopes and empires will die like yours;Mankind will die, there will be no more fools; wisdom will die; the very stars will die;One fierce life lasts."
Author: Robinson Jeffers

46. "I love Age of Empires and I play RTS games all the time, I respect what they've accomplished."
Author: Sid Meier

47. "Augustine recast how people should view history, that history was not the story of the rise and fall of empires because those are human things. Those are the city of man. Rather, true history should be the history of salvation, of man moving toward God. It's a focus that takes the light off of this world and shines it much more brightly on the next world."
Author: Thomas F. Madden

48. "All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,' the other man said to me during our initial meeting. 'Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by — whether it's religious scriptures or makeshift slogans — all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires — show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there —' he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, 'show business, show business, show business.' 'And what about dreams?' I asked, thinking I might have hit upon an exception to his dogmatic view, or at least one that he would accept as such. 'You mean the dreams of the sort we are having at this moment or the ones we have when we're fortunate enough to sleep?"
Author: Thomas Ligotti

49. "Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion."
Author: Walter M. Miller Jr.

50. "Behold a republic standing erect while empires all around are bowed beneath the weight of their own armaments - a republic whose flag is loved while other flags are only feared."
Author: William Jennings Bryan

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