Quotes About Empire

Aliera said, "You are a Jhereg." Mario said, "You are the most beautiful woman who has ever lived, or ever will live, in the Empire or anywhere else." "Well," said Aliera. "I am," remarked Mario, "confronted by a difficult decision." "Life seems to be full of them," agreed Aliera. "What is yours?" "Whether to continue running for my life, or to stay here and look at you.

Several years ago, I was getting drunk with four or five of the most powerful sorcerers in the Empire—like you do—when Daymar told a story.

The Empress expects obedience of her servants, and demands loyalty.' 'Any reasonable ruler would have the expectation and the demand the other way round.

Self-righteous wrath had planted more corpses in the ground than an empire could lay claim to

Thomas Macaulay's History of England

A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas… on the soft fibers of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires.

Once the region's apex predator, the Asiatic lion almost went extinct during the British empire's colonization of India, when no viceroy could visit a maharaja's palace without a hunt in the local forest. Even today, the Asiatic lion still ranks among the rarest of the large feline predators, rarer even than its neighbor to the north, the snow leopard, which is so scarce that a glimpse of one padding down a jagged Himalayan crag is said to consummate a spiritual pilgrimage.

Many times had Spock listened patiently while Sarek recounted, with thinly veiled bitterness, the manner in which humans, immediately following their first contact with the crew of a Vulcan scout ship, had captured the scouts and tortured them into divulging the secrets of interstellar navigation. In short order, the Terrans had turned the Vulcans' knowledge to their own aims, laying the foundation for their nascent star empire.

I've got a lot that I want to do, so I would like to expand my empire, for sure. I love it.

The horror of 9/11 represented the end of Empire, a shock that moved us out of the twentieth century's binary Cold War thinking (The center will not hold) and into a world where there was, and is, no center; our enemies are insurgent and decentralized, our media also decentralized and insurgent.

The horror of 9/11 represented the end of Empire, a shock that moved us out of the twentieth century's binary Cold War thinking (The center will not hold) and into a world where there was, and is, no center; our enemies are insurgent and decentralized, our media also decentralized and insurgent. The culture seemed like it no longer belonged to the titans but instead to whoever could seize its attention with whatever immediacy and force.

But in the end you cannot serve two masters, Theos and Elohim, the god of the Greco-Roman philosophers and Caesars and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the violent god of profit proclaimed by the empire and the compassionate God of justice proclaimed by the prophets. You can try to hybridize them and compromise them for centuries, but like oil and water they eventually separate and prove incompatible. They refuse to alloy. They produce irreconcilable narratives and create different worlds.

This papal document—which has not yet been repudiated by the Catholic Church—was the basis for the Christian justification of colonialism and the building of competitive Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch, French, Belgian, German, and other Euro-Christian empires that spanned the world.13 It was the genocide card that was given to every white Christian nation.

Roman Empire had been weakened by political corruption and a series of invasions, mass migrations

The Empire functions beyond mere laws," Paulus continued. "An equally strong foundation is the network of alliances, favors, and religious propaganda. Beliefs are more powerful than facts.

An empire built on power cannot attract the affections and loyalty that men bestow willingly on a regime of ideas and beauty. Adorn your Grand Empire with beauty, with culture.

The Spacing Guild needed vast amounts of melange to fill the enclosed chambers of their mutated Navigators. He himself, and all the upper classes in the Empire, needed daily (and increasing) doses of melange to maintain their vitality and to extend their lives. The Bene Gesserit Sisterhood needed it in their training to create more Reverend Mothers. Mentats needed it for mental focus.

A computer expert with the ability to create a one 100 million dollar empire in his mind could walk up to customs in New York with only the clothes on his back and say: nothing to declare. He could walk into this country or any country with 100 million dollars worth of value between his ears and in terms of capital or goods have nothing to declare

The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that belived they were eternal.

I heard the Empire has a tyrannical and repressive government! What form of government is that? said Ponder Stibbons. A tautology, said the Dean, from above.

Needless to say, they refused to submit to the Empire, conducting such a persistent guerrilla war that the Romans gave up hope of conquering Scotland, and the Wee Free Men remained both wee and free.

The Tezuman Empire in the jungle valleys of central Klatch is known for it organic market gardens, its exquisite craftsmanship in obsidian, feathers and jade, and its mass human sacrifices in honor of Quezovercoatl, the Feathered Boa, god of mass human sacrifices.

One of the advantages of a life much longer than average was that you saw how fragile the future was. Men said things like peace in our time or an empire that will last a thousand years, and less than half a lifetime later no one even remembered who they were, let alone what they had said or where the mob had buried their ashes. What changed history were smaller things. Often a few strokes of the pen would do the trick.

Empires inevitably fall, and when they do, history judges them for the legacies they leave behind.