Quotes About Conquest

The power of self-control is one of the great qualities that differentiates man from the lower animals. He is the only animal capable of a moral struggle or a moral conquest.

God brings his grace into the heart by conquest.

Oh he was like them, like those laced-up ladies—warm from wards. A man, he still chewed the nipple, titillation, and risked no freer, deeper draught. Fearless in speech, he was cowardly in all else…ah, to be rich, luxuriant, episcopal…well, he'd conquered that by flight.

Dramatic conquests often lead to startling serendipities: the most momentous Muslim acquisition at Talas was not territory or silk, but a commodity at once prosaic and precious. Among the Chinese prisoners taken at Talas were papermakers, who soon spread their wondrous craft into the Islamic world, and then to Europe, changing forever human culture and the course of history.

Genghis Khan roared out of the steppes to conquer all of central Asia; within a few decades, the Great Khan's descendants ruled over a group of empires comprising more territory than any dynasty before or since.

When Vasco da Gama breached the Indian Ocean, the playing field had just been vacated by the one force capable of repelling him.

In short, the Romans conquered most of their known world as much with the deeply institutionalized pen as with the sword, shield, and catapult.

Such was the pattern employed by the Romans during their centuries of conquest: first, recruit the ablest soldiers from recently pacified local populations overawed by the legionaries' size, military prowess, technology, and literacy; second, teach the new troops not only to fight but also to read and write Latin (or, in the East, Greek); and last, employ these intellectually and physically impressive specimens to conquer, pacify, overawe, and recruit adjoining peoples.

Within a few decades after the conquests of Cortés and Pizarro, the cattle population of Spanish America doubled as rapidly as every fifteen months. From Mexico to the pampas of Argentina, the vast open spaces of the New World swarmed black with livestock. One French observer in Mexico wrote in wonderment at the "great, level plains, stretching endlessly and everywhere covered with an infinite number of cattle.

In one of history's most bizarre chains of causation, the brutal, efficient newcomers were driven by a hunger for, of all things, culinary ingredients that today lie largely unused in most Western kitchens.

They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.

Women like not only to conquer, but to be conquered.

Timê is gifts of honor. After a city has been captured, what is inside the city is given out as gifts of honor. If a warrior has fought bravely, that warrior will get timê. An important kind of timê is a sex-slave.

The first colonial leaders, however, would have none of this. Most of them were military men, trained in the Irish wars. Whatever they thought of the Indian way of life, they never failed to regard the Indians themselves as peoples fated for conquest. As a counterweight to that relative handful of writers who were praising the native peoples and their governments, these British equivalents of the conquistadors viewed

Just twenty-one years after Columbus's first landing in the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the explorer had renamed Hispaniola was effectively desolate; nearly 8,000,000 people—those Columbus chose to call Indians—had been killed by violence, disease, and despair.

As with Hispaniola, Tenochtitlán, Cuzco, and elsewhere, the Spaniards' mammoth destruction of whole societies generally was a by-product of conquest and native enslavement, a genocidal means to an economic end, not an end in itself. And therein lies the central difference between the genocide committed by the Spanish and that of the Anglo-Americans: in British America extermination was the primary goal, and it was so precisely because it made economic sense.

Within no more than a handful of generations following their first encounters with Europeans, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere's native peoples had been exterminated.

Columbus says he decided to send "two men up-country" to see what they could see. "They traveled for three days," he wrote, "and found an infinite number of small villages and people without number, but nothing of importance."35 People without number—but nothing of importance. It would become a motto for the ages.

Warriors fear surrender. They are proud and defiant. They will fight to the death for what they believe in. They will struggle to conquer. Love is not about conquest. The truth is a man can only find true love when he surrenders to it. When he opens his heart to the partner of his soul and says: 'here it is! the very essence of me! It is yours to nurture or destroy.

Definite atonement is beautiful because it tells the story of the Warrior-Son who comes to earth to slay his enemy and rescue his Father's people. He is the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep, a loving Bridegroom who gives himself for his bride, and a victorious King who lavishes the spoils of his conquest on the citizens of his realm.

ancient Rome had conquered the world three times: the first time through its armies, the second through its religion, the third through its laws.91 He might have added: each time more thoroughly.

If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away.

If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies.

Extensive conquests, when pursued, must be the ruin of every free government