Quotes About Empire

In Christianity this evolution lasted centuries; in Bolshevism — only decades. If Lenin was the St. Paul of Marxism, who set out to transplant the movement from its original environment into new lands, Stalin was already its Constantine the Great. He was, to be sure, not the first Emperor to embrace Marxism, but the first Marxist revolutionary to become the autocratic ruler of a vast empire.

But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the nonexistent horizon, and his empire is an intangible one, for his domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit.

Can one move an empire as if it were a house?

Their successors, instead of ruling for the good of their subjects, tyrannize for their own; and they met with the fate of tyrants. No person not reckless of the past could wish to imitate them. The earlier and the later experiences of Athens prove, in fact, two things: that Attica produces good men, and that empire spoils them.

Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the acton changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; they open alternate mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cities of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, to whom the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle.

It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.

Yes, the empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its sores. This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind's phantasms.

The empire is being crushed by its own weight," Kublai thinks, and in his dreams now cities light as kites appear, pierced cities like laces, cities transparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves' veins, cities lined like a hand's palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness.

Forse l'impero,pensò Kublai,non è altro che uno zodiaco di fantasmi della mente.

My empire has grown too far toward the outside. It is time,' the Khan thought, 'for it to grow within itself.

On the day when I know all the emblems," he asked Marco, "shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?" And the Venetian answered: "Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.

Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing more than a zodiac of the mind's phantasms. "On the day when I know all the emblems," he asked Marco, "shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?" And the Venetian answered: "Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.

on the other hand, the Constantinian imperial churches condemned early Christian millenarianism only because they saw themselves in the Christian imperium as `the holy rule' of Christ's Thousand Years' empire. So every future hope for a different, alternative kingdom of Christ was feared and condemned as heresy.

New Jerusalem is found wherever human community resists the ways of empire and places God at the center of its shared life."27

Rebuild your world, rebuild your race, rebuild your empire. Rebuild it all. But make sure you rebuild your ideals too. Rebuild the principles that made you a great and honorable galactic power in the first place. Don't prey on the weak. Don't steal from the helpless. Don't murder the innocent. Be a force for good, not a force for yourself.

Britain alone controlled almost a fifth of the world.

Germany made every effort to acquire a small empire in the bits left unclaimed in Africa, China and the Pacific, only to lose it all to Britain after the First World War. All this was a signal that, by the late 19th century, being the largest empire no longer guaranteed having the largest economy.

The East India Company created the Dutch empire in Indonesia by means of brute force combined with economic pressure.

One's teachers all belonged to that generation who were imperialists, and the whole narrative throughout my adolescence was of countries leaving the empire. I find it extraordinary that this purpose which drove how we viewed the world is now considered to be something that has no effect upon us.

My father never violated any copyright laws. He created cover versions, that is, he got new singers to sing popular Hindi songs to build his music empire. This was permitted under the law and he did not do anything illegal.

My view as a historian is that the empire was an extractive, exploitative, racist and violent institution and that the history of empire is one we need to confront and come to terms with, rather than celebrate.

Ancient Rome was a violent place.

President Reagan was a leader at a time when the American people most needed leadership. He outlined a vision that captured the imagination of the free world, a vision that toppled the Communist empire and freed countless millions.