Quotes About Empire

The Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea at his summer palace and invited the bishops to attend, all expenses paid. As an added lure, he even mentioned "the excellent temperature of the air." Constantine had his own agenda. He wanted to get this unsettled problem of Jesus' identity straightened out so that Christianity could better serve as cement for his sprawling empire. He

Dreams are what keep a man going, William, and already your father was dreaming empire. But looking at him on the day he left that town he was born in, you would have seen little more than a young, handsome boy with nothing but the clothes on his back and the holes in his shoes. You might not have actually seen the holes in his shoes, but they were there, William; the holes were there. "That

Various Turkish people invaded southwest Asia during the Middle Ages and carved an empire for themselves from lands occupied by the indigenous Semitic and Indo-European inhabitants.

I recognize no empire of this present age.

Rome alone can resist Rome.

The first principle of his policy was that the various peoples of his empire should be left free in their religious worship and beliefs, for he fully understood the first principle of statesmanship—that religion is stronger than the state.

Magnanimity in politics," said Edmund Burke, "is not seldom the truest wisdom, and a great empire and little minds go ill together

Cyrus and Darius created Persia, Xerxes inherited it, his successors destroyed it.

When Cyrus and his disciplined Persians stood at the gates, the anticlericals of Babylon connived to open the city to him, and welcomed his enlightened domination.170 For two centuries Persia ruled Babylonia as part of the greatest empire that history had yet known. Then the exuberant Alexander came, captured the unresisting capital, conquered all the Near East, and drank himself to death in the palace of Nebuchadrezzar.171

No, no - you have to understand, Lysander, here in Vienna, in this ramshackle empire of ours, suicide is a perfectly reasonable course of action. Everyone will know your true feelings and why you had no choice but to do it - no one will condemn you or blame you.

In 250, Decius required that all citizens of the empire must perform a public sacrifice to the emperor. This sacrifice had to be performed with a Roman magistrate as an eyewitness, and a certificate (a libellus) that the task was done had to be issued as well.

You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.

Hiçbir kral, hiçbir imparator, hiçbir hükümdar devletini yitirdi?i için Boranl? Yedigey kadar umutsuzlu?a dü?memi?, onun kadar ac? duymam?? ve a?lamam??t?.

The veneration of sacred portraits – icons – has been an essential element of Orthodox Christianity ever since, and marked Byzantine religious culture until the empire's end.

The first constitutional monarchy in the Muslim world was established in Tunis in 1861.

Reza implemented an impressive number of reforms that were designed to turn the cracked empire he had inherited into a purposeful nation state. But he ended up, like so many of his fellow dictators, alone in his citadel. And much of the goods he did was nullified by the way he did it.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world.

The loss of empire deprived Spain's over-large officer corps, which had been inherited from the continuous wars of the 19th century, of any meaningful external defensive role. In so doing, imperial defeat turned the military into a powerful internal political lobby determined to find a new role while guarding against any loss of income or prestige in the interim.

Celsus was the first known person to realize that this non-political, quietist, and pacifist community had it in its power to transform the social and political order of the empire.

If Chinese exceptionalism represented the claims of a universal empire, Japanese exceptionalism sprang from the insecurities of an island nation borrowing heavily from its neighbor, but fearful of being dominated by it.

For the greatest part of humanity and the longest periods of history, empire has been the typical mode of government.

postcolonial" countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial

Constantly changing shape as its rulers annexed contiguous territories, Russia was an empire out of scale in comparison with any of the European countries. Moreover, with every new conquest, the character of the state changed as it incorporated another brand-new, restive, non-Russian ethnic group. This was one of the reasons Russia felt obliged to maintain huge armies whose size was unrelated to any plausible threat to its external security.

Religion and politics never merged into a single construct, leading to Voltaire's truthful jest that the Holy Roman Empire was "neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.