Empire Quotes

There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire. ~ Honore De Balzac

There's only one reason to be crucified under the Roman Empire, and that is for treason or sedition. Crucifixion, we have to understand, was not actually a form of capital punishment for Rome. In fact, it was often the case that the criminal would be killed first and then crucified. ~ Reza Aslan

The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty. She remains on the map for having seduced two of the greatest men of her time, while her crime was to have entered into those same "wily and suspicious" marital partnerships that every man in power enjoyed. She did so in reverse and in her own name; this made her a deviant, socially disruptive, an unnatural woman. To these she added a few other offenses. She made Rome feel uncouth, insecure, and poor, sufficient cause for anxiety without adding sexuality into the mix. ~ Stacy Schiff

Europe was not born in the early Middle Ages. No common identity in 1000 linked Spain to Russia, Ireland to the Byzantine empire (in what is now the Balkans, Greece and Turkey), except the very weak sense of community that linked Christian polities together. There was no common European culture, and certainly not any Europe-wide economy. There was no sign whatsoever that Europe would, in a still rather distant future, develop economically and militarily, so as to be able to dominate the world. Anyone in 1000 looking for future industrialization would have put bets on the economy of Egypt, not of the Rhineland and Low Countries, and that of Lancashire would have seemed like a joke. In politico-military terms, the far south-east and south-west of Europe, Byzantium and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), provided the dominant states of the Continent, whereas in western Europe the Carolingian experiment (see below, Chapters 16 and 17) had ended with the break-up of Francia (modern France, Belgium and western Germany), the hegemonic polity for the previous four hundred years. The most coherent western state in 1000, southern England, was tiny. In fact, weak political systems dominated most of the Continent at the end of our period, and the active and aggressive political systems of later on in the Middle Ages were hardly visible.

National identities, too, were not widely prominent in 1000, even if one rejects the association between nationalism and modernity made in much contemp ~ Chris Wickham

The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire. From a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers, processors of information. ~ Edward Abbey

In the wake of my broken dreams
In the dirt and the dust and the days that felt like weeks.
I found the person that I'm meant to be
'Cause when I felt like giving up
When death was closing in
I shut my eyes
And black out the darkness with light from inside
I've given more
Than what I've got
I've given all
Of what I'm not
I've watched this war consume all that we could become
Facing my fears in the dark
But if I die
Before it's done
Please take these words
My final thoughts
The only way to shine your light is in the dark.
Never let life kill your spark
This is the fallout
Yeah it's the end of the world
We'll spread the noise to everyone and let them all know you heard
A system meltdown
It's time we expose
The 'cause of chaos is our own
I've given more
Than what I've got
I've given all
Of what I'm not
I've watched this war consume all that we could become
Facing my fears in the dark
But if I die
Before it's done
Please take these words
My final thoughts
The only way to shine your light is in the dark.
Never let life kill your spark
Never let life kill your spark
Never let life kill your spark
Facing my fears in the dark
I've given more
Than what I've got
I've given all
Of what I'm not
I've watched this war consume all that we could become
If I die
Befo ~ Crown The Empire

All dreams of empire end because day breaks in the hearts of the slaves used to build it. ~ Luke Montgomery

In an Empire where rats ruled, he was the king of the rats. ~ Agatha Christie

Imperial politics represents the conquest of domestic politics and the latter's conversion into a crucial element of inverted totalitarianism. It makes no sense to ask how the democratic citizen could 'participate' substantively in imperial politics; hence it is not surprising that the subject of empire is taboo in electoral debates. No major politician or party has so much as publicly remarked on the existence of an American empire. ~ Chalmers Johnson

Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes. ~ Alan Moore

If their social institutions were abhorrent, their unwritten constitution bordered upon the absurd. The absolutist monarchs of the ancient kingdoms of Amara looked with detestation at the Shazarian constitutional monarchy. Yet this was no time to demonstrate loathing of the upstart nation; condescension could wait until after Sixto had been defeated. ~ A.H. Septimius

The sign above the door was written in French. It read: ARRÊTE ! C'EST ICI L'EMPIRE DE LA MORT.
"That means," he explained to Gini, "'Stop! It is here the Empire of Death. ~ Paul Aertker

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. ~ Italo Calvino

Modern Western empires are different from empires of old as well as the Soviet empire of yesterday in one important respect: they combine a democratic political system at home with despotism abroad. Even in the German case, as Sheldon Wolin reminds us, Nazi terror was not applied to the population generally. So long as democracy is a living reality at home, democratic empires are potentially self-correcting. ~ Mahmood Mamdani

When there is power there is corruption, free yourself from these vicissitudes and you will build an empire based on your beliefs. ~ Davey

Ghana was a particularly relevant example for us subjects in the remaining colonies and dominions of the British Empire. There was a growing confidence, not just a feeling, that we would do just as well parting ways with Her Majesty's empire. If Ghana seemed more effective, as some of our people like to say, perhaps it was because she was smaller in size and neat, as if it was tied together more delicately by well-groomed, expert hands. ~ Chinua Achebe

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Classics is a subject that exists in that gap between us and the word of the Greeks and Romans. The questions raised by Classics are the questions raised by our distance from 'their' world, and at the same time by our closeness to it, and its familiarity to us. In our museums, in our literature, languages, culture, and ways of thinking. The aim of Classics is not only to discover or uncover the ancient world (though that is part of it, as the rediscovery of Bassae, or the excavation of the furthest outposts of the Roman empire on the Scottish borders, shows). Its aim is to also define and debate our relationship to that world. ~ Mary Beard

At the age of fifty-six Eleanor Stoddard was still a beautiful woman. She owned three hotels in France and another two in England. From nothing at all, she had built an empire. Eleanor had it all. Her one weakness was the young man sleeping beside her. ~ Barbara Taylor Bradford

No one can say how far Herr Hitler's empire will extend before this war is over, but I have no doubt it will pass away perhaps more swiftly than Napoleon's empire and without its glory. The British spirit and temperment, bred in freedom, will prove more enduring and resilient than the most efficient mechanical discipline.
Winston Churchill ~ Michael Tappenden

Take a rest and the world catches up with you. Lesson in life - keep moving. ~ Mark Lawrence

Turkey has never been colonized, so it remained as an independent nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. ~ Mustafa Akyol

But the line of thought that I'd been chasing for several days was implicit in the ruins of the old Roman Empire, which gradually destroyed itself by substituting the faith in a legion of miraculous words for the strength of armies and the weight of walls. ~ Lewis H. Lapham

when the old empire began to rot at the fringes, it could be considered that science, as science, had failed the outer worlds. To be re-accepted it would have to present itself in another guise ~ Isaac Asimov

enough for the Republic - but the Empire is order from chaos. What we do here - and in thousands of systems just like this one - brings us closer to our ultimate goal." Sloane thought for a moment. "Perfection?" "Whatever the Emperor wants. ~ John Jackson Miller

People [in US] are starting to rethink this idea of empire, this idea of the United States being this superpower, the hegemon, is not working, and we can't afford it anymore. ~ Peter Kuznick

For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. ~ J.M. Coetzee

Golden Rule has been rediscovered many times: by the authors of Leviticus and the Mahabharata; by Hillel, Jesus, and Confucius; by the Stoic philosophers of the Roman Empire; by social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke; and by moral philosophers such as Kant in his categorical imperative. ~ Steven Pinker

Geological facts being of an historical nature, all attempts to deduce a complete knowledge of them merely from their still, subsisting consequences, to the exclusion of unexceptionable testimony, must be deemed as absurd as that of deducing the history of ancient Rome solely from the medals or other monuments of antiquity it still exhibits, or the scattered ruins of its empire, to the exclusion of a Livy, a Sallust, or a Tacitus. ~ Richard Kirwan

The words spoken by the leader of the free world can expand the frontiers of freedom or shrink them. When Ronald Reagan called on Gorbachev to 'tear down this wall', a surge of confidence rose that would ultimately breach the bounds of the evil empire. ~ Mitt Romney

How often has not the parallel been drawn and the golden age of the Roman Empire, when the external brilliancy of life likewise dazzled the eye, notwithstanding that the social diagnosis could yield no other verdict than 'rotten to the very core'? ~ Abraham Kuyper

Providence has given to the French the empire of the land, to the English that of the sea, to the Germans that of
the air! ~ Thomas Carlyle

I have my throne, I have my sword, I have an empire. But I have . . . no-one. ~ Steven Erikson

The Roman Empire, Vikings, British, Spanish, Portuguese,... all raped women, but it always seems worse when done to us. ~ Daniel Marques

[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without 'sky'. Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God's beard and the Devil's horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas. ~ Arthur Miller

If I go anywhere where there are people who vaguely look like me, there is always that feeling of, 'Actually I do look quite similar to everyone else.' At moments like that, I become very, very British. My accent gets more clipped, and I stride around as if I've got an empire. ~ Sanjeev Bhaskar

[Roman] society became steadily more cosmopolitan. By 212 A.D., all inhabitants of the empire, except for slaves, were deemed to be citizens. The old Roman aristocracy was not fixated upon race and color. Wealth and literacy were what opened the doors of their urban mansions and country villas. ~ Norman F. Cantor

Your real self - the 'I am I' - is master of this land, the ruler of this empire. You rightfully have power and dominion over it, all its inhabitants, and all contained in its realm. ~ Robert Collier

We do not seek the unanimity that comes to those who water down all issues to the lowest common denominator - or to those who conceal their differences behind fixed smiles - or to those who measure unity by standards of popularity and affection, instead of trust and respect. We are allies. This is a partnership, not an empire. We are bound to have differences and disappointments - and we are equally bound to bring them out into the open, to settle them where they can be settled, and to respect each other's views when they cannot be settled. ~ John F. Kennedy

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

Every empire grows until its reach exceeds its grasp. ~ James S.A. Corey

Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free. Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward among the furthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before
and thus was the Empire forged.
... In these enlightened days, of course, no one believes a word of it. ~ Douglas Adams

If we don't stop behaving like the British Empire, we will end up like the British Empire. ~ Pat Buchanan

... and left decimated. Not for myself, but for all the single women out there trying to date. I wanted to run to the top of the Empire State Building and make an announcement to all of them to let them know they are worth so much more than this. That they don't need to wrangle some warm body to sit next to them just so they aren't alone on holidays. That they should never let a magazine or dating site or matchmaker monster tell them they're in a lower bracket of desirability because of their age or weight or face or sense of humor. ~ Amy Schumer

The pastoral labours of the archbishop of Constantinople provoked and gradually united against him two sorts of enemies; the aspiring clergy, who envied his success, and the obstinate sinners, who were offended by his reproofs. When Chrysostom thundered from the pulpit of St. Sophia against the degeneracy of the Christians, his shafts were spent among the crowd, without wounding or even marking the character of any individual. ~ Edward Gibbon

What I said was Britain was ready for another Hitler, which is quite a different thing to saying it needs another Hitler. I stand by that opinion - in fact I was ahead of my time in voicing it. There are in Britain right now parallels with the rise of the Nazi Party in pre-war Germany. A demoralised nation whose empire had disintegrated." Two years later, Margaret Thatcher was elected.
- Quoting David Bowie from 1977 ~ Mark Paytress

I am not in the market to create jobs, build an
empire, or leave a legacy; those are the positive fallout of successful
economic warfare. My prime objective is wealth creation. ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

That's a lesson we could stand to learn. Imperials are just like us. Some of them, at least. It's easy to label those who serve the Galactic Empire as pure evil, all enemy, but truth is, a lot of those who do so were either sold a bill of lies, or forced to by threat of pain or death. ~ Chuck Wendig

Women are the most spectacular instance of this. After a period of independence that came with the spread of Christianity, they were relegated to a lower order. This is all the more interesting because the gospel and the first church were never hostile to women nor treated them as minors, and the situation of women in the Roman empire (particularly in the East) was relatively favourable. In spite of this, when Christianity became a power or authority, this worked against women. A strange perversion, yet fully understandable when we allow that women represent precisely the most innovative elements in Christianity: grace, love, charity, a concern for living creatures, nonviolence, an interest in little things, the hope of new beginnings - the very elements that Christianity was setting aside in favor of glory and success. ~ Jacques Ellul

The Empire pretends it's about law and order, but at the end of the day, it's about dressing up oppression in the costume of justice. The ~ Chuck Wendig

We are not here to build our empire only but also to help people discover the kingdom of God ~ Sunday Adelaja

New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end ... It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America. ~ Bernard DeVoto

I remember everything What have I become? My sweetest friend? E veryone I know goes away in the end You could have it all My empire of dirt I will let you down I will make you hurt. ~ Johnny Cash

Such was the end of Philip (II, king of Macedonia) ... He had ruled 24 years. He is known to fame as one who with but the slenderest resources to support his claim to a throne won for himself the greatest empire among the Hellenes (Greeks), while the growth of his position was not due so much to his prowess in arms as to his adroitness and cordiality in diplomacy. ~ Diodorus Siculus

It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by wolves that they were conquered & displaced by the children of the northern forests who were. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The Empire State Building was tall. So what? Just proved New York builders didn't know when to stop at a good story. ~ Craig L. Rice

I will journey to the black heart of a corrupt empire to root out my foes. But Rome wasn't built in a day and it won't be restored by a lone Assassin. I am Ezio Auditore Da Firenze. This is my Brotherhood. ~ Oliver Bowden

In careless ignorance they think it civilization, when in reality it is a portion of their slavery ... To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false pretenses, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace. ~ Tacitus

Linnaeus's last lesson, of which he himself was unaware, was that professorships kill philosophers. Oh, I'm vain enough to want my burgeoning Flora Japonica to be published one day
as a votive offering to human knowledge
but a seat at Uppsala, or Leiden, or Cambridge, holds no allure. My heart is the East's in this lifetime. This is my third year in Nagasaki, and I have work enough for another three, or six. During the court embassy I can see landscapes no European botanist ever saw. My seminarians are keen young men
with one young woman
and visiting scholars bring me specimens from all over the empire. ~ David Mitchell

The Mirror Empire is the most original fantasy I've read in a long time, set in a world full of new ideas, expanding the horizons of the genre. A complex and intricate book full of elegant ideas and finely-drawn characters. ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky

Neither is it the acme of excellence if you fight and conquer and the whole Empire says, "Well done! ~ Sun Tzu

That's why the Emperor needs an Empire, Kanan. It's like a space slug, whose only function is to stay alive. It's got to consume, and consume, and consume. ~ John Jackson Miller

The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire. ~ Dave Barry

Rome was not the first state of organized gangsterdom, nor was it the last; but it was the only one that managed to bamboozle posterity into an almost universal admiration. Few rational men admire the Huns, the Nazis or the Soviets; but for centuries, schoolboys have been expected to read Julius Caesar's militaristic drivel ("We inflicted heavy losses upon the enemy, our own casualties being very light") and Cato's revolting incitements to war. They have been led to believe that the Romans had attained an advanced level in the sciences, the arts, law, architecture, engineering and everything else. It is my opinion that the alleged Roman achievements are largely a myth; and I feel it is time for this myth to be debunked a little. What the Romans excelled in was bullying, bludgeoning, butchering and blood baths. Like the Soviet Empire, the Roman Empire enslaved peoples whose cultural level was far above their own. They not only ruthlessly vandalized their countries, but they also looted them, stealing their art treasures, abducting their scientists and copying their technical know-how, which the Romans' barren society was rarely able to improve on. No wonder, then, that Rome was filled with great works of art. But the light of culture which Rome is supposed to have emanated was a borrowed light: borrowed from the Greeks and the other peoples that the Roman militarists had enslaved. ~ Petr Beckmann

In the best stories, the heroes always give their lives, for honour, duty, sacrifice and the glory of the empire. Anything less and it is not much of a story at all. ~ Julie Kagawa

You can build the Empire State Building. Train the Prussian army. Elevate the hierarchy of a totalitarian state higher than the throne of the Most High.
But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Twin Towers stood out like an enormous number 11 looming over New York City, a familiar icon coupled with the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State building and the Statue of Liberty. Those towers were like the soul of lower Manhattan, alive in their own right. ~ Rebecca McNutt

It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind. ~ Winston Churchill

This may read like a mad journey through some of the most dangerous places on earth, but it is much more than that as well. Sheets witnessed most of the wars, disasters, and revolutions that followed the end of communism, and his accounts of them
from Chechnya to Chernobyl, and from Abkhazia to Afghanistan
serve as a passionate but considered obituary for the vanished Soviet empire. ~ Oliver Bullough

It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine. ~ John Stuart Mill

Magic had always been a part of the empire - for some people it was like breathing. How was it okay to make existing illegal? ~ Nicki Pau Preto

He was not the Empire - not every moment of oppression and indignity and torment she had ever suffered. He was an Imperial, a petty, spiteful, scared little man who'd forgotten his own atrocities. ~ Alexander Freed

I've worked with a lot of gay and lesbian organizations. I sit on the board of the Empire State Pride Agenda. I've also done a lot of work for Broadway Care/Equity Fights AIDS. I think it's important because, when we can be of service to others, it only enhances our lives. I've been helped a lot in my life. ~ Billy Porter

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
It was just where I went. ~ Robert Penn Warren

In recent times, European nations, with the use of gunpowder and other technical improvements in warfare, controlled practically the whole world. One, the British Empire, brought under one government a quarter of the earth and its inhabitants. ~ John Boyd Orr

Clarity of vision is a thing much prized. I find when you turn that clear sight upon yourself - and see through to the truth behind your own actions - it might be better to be blind. ~ Mark Lawrence

This Irish war, small as it may seem now, will, if it is persisted in, corrupt and eventually ruin not only your army, but your Empire itself. What right has England to torment and demoralise Ireland? ~ Erskine Childers

We'll make another kind of empire ~ C.S. Pacat

Empires exist for the benefit of the parent state. That, and the fact that the colonists eventually came to appreciate this truth, goes a long way toward explaining the origins of the American Revolution. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the authorities in London, the seat of Great Britain's empire, ~ John Ferling

He did everything. He studied hard. He went to Harvard. He got married. He had children. He worked. He dreamed big. He pulled his bootstraps all the way up from his humble beginnings to the presidency. He lived the American Dream. And he was called an African Witch Doctor. People asked for his birth certificate. A congressman shouted at him "YOU LIE!" He faced the most recalcitrant Republican Congress ever that was elected by a constituency that wanted to "take the country back."If a black man can be elected as guardian of the American empire, do exactly that, and still not be shielded from racism, what hope is supposed to be left? ~ Mychal Denzel Smith

How do you have a democratic empire, how do you have an imperial foreign policy built on a democracy polity. It's like some sort of strange mythical beast that's part lion, part dragon. You know at the bottom is a democracy, and then it's an imperial power around the world. ~ Mark Danner

We been on the road for 18 hours ... I need a bath, some chow ... and then you and me sit down, and we talk about who dies,eh? ~ Al Capone

There's a sense that, on a certain day, you want to destroy everything, even the ones you love. Humans are weird like that. You build an empire and you hate it as soon as it's done. That's because we're never satisfied. ~ Jamie Lidell

But like the best empire builders, he was both very determined and very skeptical. It's like [former Intel CEO] Andy Grove says, 'only the paranoid survive. ~ David Kirkpatrick

[Luke, holding stormtrooper helmet.] Alas, poor stormtrooper, I knew ye not,/ yet have I taken both uniform and life/ From thee. What manner of a man wert thou?/ A man of inf'nite jest or cruelty?/ A man with helpmate and with children too?/ A man who hath his Empire serv'd with pride?/ A man, perhaps, who wish'd for perfect peace?/ What'er thou wert, goodman, thy pardon grant/ Unto the one who took thy place: e'en me. ~ Ian Doescher

The age of empire had entered into the first gasps of its terminal phase. ~ John Darnielle

The Romanovs are overtaken by the Indian Maharajahs as American heiresses pick over the carcasses of fallen Empire. ~ Suzy Menkes

When the British Empire turned their back on millions of Irish dying during the Great Famine, Muslim nations sent food relief. ~ Fuad Alakbarov

Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie. It's more of a man's world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries. ~ Maureen Dowd

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.
(Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003) ~ Edward W. Said

His [Andy warhol] films were way ahead of the times ... and I'm not suggesting this has all necessarily been a good thing for America, mind you. I kind of think we're all in a really big mess, kind of like the end days of the Roman Empire. ~ Bob Colacello

Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. ~ Herman Melville

In this sense, Byzantine culture embodies the French historian Fernand Braudel's notion of the longue durée, the long term: that which survives the vicissitudes of changing governments, newfangled fashions or technological improvements, an ongoing inheritance that can both imprison and inspire. ~ Judith Herrin

The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment. ~ Edward Bond

I've always been drawn to the Edwardian period in England. To me, it seems like such a fascinating time, when the British Empire was at the height of its powers and the strict mores of the Victorian age were dissipating into the decadence of King Edward's reign. ~ Kevin Kwan

We couldn't trust them. They couldn't trust us. Mutual attempts at destruction are the only logical result. He thought of human dreams - both Old Empire and new - of contacting some extra-terrestrial intelligence such as nobody had ever truly encountered. Why? Why would we ever want to? We'd never be able to communicate, and even if we could, we'd still be those same two prisoners forced to trust - and risk - or to damn the other in trying to save slightly more of our own hides. ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky

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. ~ Kobo Abe

Love's empire is this globe and all mankind; the most refined and the most degraded, the cleverest and the most stupid, are all liable to become his faithful subjects. He can alike command the devotion of an archbishop and a South-Sea Islander, of the most immaculate maiden lady (whatever her age) and of the savage Zulu girl. From the pole to the equator, and from the equator to the further pole, there is no monarch like Love. ~ H. Rider Haggard

It is said, that South Indian Music, as known today, flourished in Deogiri the capital city of the Yadavas in the middle ages, and that after the invasion and plunder of the city by the Muslims, the entire cultural life of the city took shelter in the Carnatic Empire of Vijayanagar under the reign of Krishnadevaraya. Thereafter, the music ~ Gaurav Mishra