Quotes About Empire

Ronald Steel noted, "Unlike Rome, we have not exploited our empire. On the contrary, our empire has exploited us, making enormous drains on our resources and energies.

The perfection preached in the Gospels never yet built up an empire. Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning. But all those things will be forgiven him, indeed, they will be regarded as high qualities, if he can make of them the means to achieve great ends.

An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy.

we must view the present period as one of liberation—from the teleological view of progress, from the dehumanization of the industrial age, and from the burdens of empire. This is a period that provides every one of us with the opportunity to participate in a drama of world-historic political and cultural implications.

While Byzantium drew its deepest identity from the belief that it was perpetuating the true tradition of the Roman Empire, it increasingly came to view the Western Church as a geopolitical rival whose power was ultimately as threatening to Byzantine power and identity as Islam itself. The Middle East was thus quite capable, without Islam, of developing aversion to the West.

Yet how could the Empire possibly have kept itself stable, using such crude creatures as humans?

Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity

Does the Convocation make the laws?" Erskyll asked. Hozhet was perplexed. "Make laws, Lord Proconsul? Oh, no. We have laws." There were planets, here and there through the Empire, where an attitude like that would have been distinctly beneficial; planets with elective parliaments, every member of which felt himself obligated to get as many laws enacted during his term of office as possible.

It fitted Baskul and Delhi and London, war making and empire building, consulates and trade concessions and dinner parties at Government House; there was a reek of dissolution over all that recollected world, and Barnard's cropper had only, perhaps, been better dramatized than his own. The whole game was doubtless going to pieces, but fortunately the players were not as a rule put on trial for the pieces they had failed to save. In that respect financiers were unlucky.

A poet, yes, but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's mouth? The seas' ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: it seems history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating. —That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets. —Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt said that.

Understand this: you no longer represent your homeworlds solely. Coruscant, Alderaan, Chandrila ... All these and tens of thousands of worlds far removed from the Core are cells of the Empire, and what affects one, affects us all. No disturbances will be tolerated. Interplanetary squabbles or threats of secession will meet with harsh reprisals. I have not led us through three years of galactic warfare to allow a resurgence of the old ways. The Republic is extinct.

I refuse to live my life under terms dictated by the Empire.

Just now the Joint Chiefs of the Empire's military were gathered—Admiral Antonio Motti, General Cassio Tagge, Rear Admirals Ozzel, Jerjerrod, and others—along with several top officers from COMPNOR, including Director Armand Isard, ISB deputy director Harus Ison, and Colonel Wullf Yularen. Naval Intelligence was represented by Vice Admirals Rancit and Screed

My instructions to Lord Vader and Moff Tarkin were to make an example of the shipjackers, not to allow the shipjackers to make a laughingstock of the Empire's intelligence chiefs.

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

The knowledge that we have brother scouts working in the same uniform, to the same ends, in the same way, in all corners of the Empire, cannot but make scouts proud of their brotherhood, and cannot fail to bring them into closer sympathy.

The dream of empire died when Shanghai surrendered without a fight. Even at the age of 11 or 12, I knew that no amount of patriotic newsreels would put the Union Jack jigsaw together again. From then on, I was slightly suspicious of all British adults.

Being born white in South Africa or anywhere in the empire and Commonwealth automatically conferred this special status. You had no problem finding a place to live, a job, trade union membership, access to social services. Being white, speaking English, you were accepted as English, entitled to all the rights of citizenship.

It seems that the most important thing about Reagan was his anti-Communism and his reputation as a hawk who saw the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire.'

The interests of the Soviet Union are in controlling highly developed countries and having the benefit of their economies so that they can run their own inefficient empire.

By now it is evident that the Soviet Union must gain control of Europe to maintain its empire.

Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan's consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union - the only competing world empire at the time - was bound to collapse!