Quotes About Empires

Empires dissolve and peoples disappear, song passes not away.

The tension between isolationism and the global economy creates what George Kennan called "fateful alliances": multinational power blocs. We call them "New Empires" because they take on the qualities of empires. Federated and all-powerful, bureaucratic but decentralized, these superpower-style blocs of countries and corporations grow to dominate the world. They are often benevolent, but they are always despots.

Chance – invisible, furtive, and silent – is the vast canvas upon which all the rest of war is painted. Skill, courage, ruse, character, the elements of nature, technology and all the other components of war all operate against the backdrop of chance. Again and again, chance has raised up and brought down empires, snatched laurels from one hand to throw to another, and destroyed the most finely wrought plans.

os nossos historiógrafos, há seis mil luas, não fazem referência a outras regiões senão aos dois grandes impérios de Lilipute e de Blefuscu. Estas duas poderosas potências têm, como ia dizendo, andado empenhadas, durante trinta e seis luas, numa guerra

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

The dreams of man, the seeds of state communities, the spores of empires.

What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable conditions for humanness. In the arrangement of "lawfulness" in Jesus' time, as in the ancient empire of Pharaoh, the one unpermitted quality of relation was compassion. Empires are never built or maintained on the basis of compassion.

The soil of the sacred city is filled with the remnants of empires that miscalculated. Jerusalem is the city of God. But it is also a gravestone to the folly of man. – Holy Father

His civilization had flourished for thousands of years in the harsh and unforgiving land of Mesopotamia before anyone had ever heard of a place called America. And it would survive long after the great American experiment receded into history. Of this, Saladin was certain. All great empires eventually collapsed. Only Islam was forever. The

To a large extent, that's the way empires work. Internal class war is a significant element of empire.

We crawl out of rocks, set our calendars, make a civilisation, scrabble around for quoins, build our proud little empires, and then one day someone puts too many quoins in the same place and it all comes crashing down.

Territorial expansion demands warriors and, once population levels are stable, demotes the female role. Once religious empires have not just an idea but a territory to call their own, the soldiers of god are of more value than his handmaidens.

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.

Afghanistan is more than the "graveyard of empires." It's the mother of vicious circles. —MAUREEN DOWD

By and large, only behind the most obscure doors of high academe can one unearth a mention of the great African empires and polities of antiquity like Kush, Benin, Meroe, Djenne, Ghana, and Songhay.

All libraries must submit to a certain order, I answered. Indeed, agreed the professor, or all will be lost. The fall of nations and empires begins with the fall of libraries.

Violence and resistance are the only answer. Empire has to feel pain or it will never stop devouring you. It is only when a gun is put in a person's face that anything changes. All empires are hungry cannibals...

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.

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.

have we ever heard of any one dynasty ruling endlessly, beyond all bounds of time? Never! Even the illustrious Ishvaku clan, which boasted Lord Rama, died out. The Rettai Mandalathar rose to bring the Chalukya reign to an end. Empires and dynasties do have a habit of rising to tremendous greatness, and crashing to hollow depths; entirely natural, don't you think? There are kingdoms that have ruled for centuries, and disappeared without a trace.

Our civilization is now in the transition stage between the age of warring empires and a new age of world unity and peace.

Europe is a molehill. All great empires and revolutions have been on the Orient; six hundred millions live there.

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.