Empires Quotes - Page 26

• Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Inspirational Love, Jesus, Men

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• ... the connection between imperial politics and culture is astonishingly direct. American attitudes to American "greatness", to hierarchies of race, to the perils of "other" revolutions (the American revolution being considered unique and somehow unrepeatable anywhere else in the world) have remained constant, have dictated, have obscured, the realities of empire, while apologists for overseas American interests have insisted on American innocence, doing good, fighting for freedom.

  Edward Said

  Attitude, Fighting, Reality

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

  Ismail Kadaré

  Moving, House, Ifs

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• One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Night, Cities, Pyramids

  J. M. Coetzee (1980). “Waiting for the Barbarians”, Penguin Group USA

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• Give me a shot to remember And you can take all the pain away from me A kiss and I will surrender The sharpest lives are the deadliest to lead A light to burn all the empires So bright the sun is ashamed to rise and be And I'm in love with all of those vampires So you can leave like the sane abandoned me

  Gerard Way

  Music, Pain, Kissing

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• To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.

  Cornel West

  Christian, Land, Names

  Cornel West (2005). “Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism”, p.107, Penguin

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• You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time." Thank you. Do you want something?

  Neil Gaiman

  Thinking, Lakes, Want Something

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• History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

  John Updike

  Too Much, Littles, Decline

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit Is Rich”, p.260, Random House

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• Words, words, word. Once, I had the gift. I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups of clay. Love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. For sixpence a line, I could cause a riot in a nunnery. But now -- I have lost my gift. It's as if my quill is broken, as if the organ of my imagination has dried up, as if the proud -illegible word- of my genius has collapsed.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Heart, Two, Broken

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• To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From it's own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, not falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous,beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Beautiful, Night, Thinking

  'Prometheus Unbound' (1820) act 4, l. 570

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• As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generaitons, giving brith to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, an empire...I'll put it bluntly. Human beings are free excpet when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me - to find out what you're good for.

  Orson Scott Card

  Light, Cities, Giving

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• Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished, by millions of solitary individuals whose and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history.

  Albert Camus

  Lying, Believe, Men

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• 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.

  Douglas Adams

  Men, Brave, Deeds

  Douglas Adams (2012). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five”, p.81, Pan Macmillan

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• Mene mene tekel upsharin,' Jace said with a faint smile. 'You don't recognize it? It's from the Bible, vampire. The old one. That's your book, isn't it?' Just because I'm Jewish doesn't mean I've memorized the Old Testament.' It's the Writing on the Wall. "God hath numbered thy kingdom, and brought it to an end; thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." It's a portent of doom--it means the end of an empire.

  Cassandra Clare

  Art, Wall, Book

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• Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine; Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine! Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And universal darkness buries all.

  Alexander Pope

  Fall, Flames, Hands

  'The Dunciad' (1742) bk. 4, l. 653

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• 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.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Country, Growing Up, Blood

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• Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.

  Albert Camus

  Church, Sun, Born

  Albert Camus (1964). “The fall, & Exile and the kingdom”, Random House Inc

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• Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.

  Eduardo Galeano

  Victory, Gold, Poison

  Eduardo Galeano (1997). “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent”, p.2, NYU Press

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• When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.

  Ezra Pound

  Fall, Kingdoms, Diminish

  Ezra Pound (1970). “A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska”, p.114, New Directions Publishing

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• God save the Queen and a fascist regime … a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire

  William S. Burroughs

  Karma, Queens, Stupid

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• I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Song, Believe, Character

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.102, Ultramarine Publishing

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• I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.

  Gary Shteyngart

  Wish, Dying, My Own

  Gary Shteyngart (2010). “Super Sad True Love Story”, p.116, Granta Books

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• Great empires are not maintained by timidity.

  Tacitus

  Rome, Great Empires, Timidity

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• So you can't live in Manhattan?' she asked. Amos's brow furrowed as he looked across at the Empire State Building. 'Manhattan has other problems. Other gods. It's best we stay separate.

  Rick Riordan

  Manhattan, Problem, Building

  Rick Riordan (2010). “The Kane Chronicles, The, Book One: Red Pyramid”, Hyperion

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• Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.

  Jared Diamond

  Rhinos, Troops, Shock

  Jared Diamond (2017). “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies”, p.352, W. W. Norton & Company

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