Quotes & Sayings About Aztecs

The Mexicans descend from the Aztecs; the Peruvians descend from the Incas; the Argentineans descend from the boats. — Carlos Fuentes

You leave behind your fine poems.
You leave behind your beautiful flowers. And the earth that was only leant to you. You ascend into the Light, O Quechomitl, you leave behind the flowers and the singing and the earth. Safe journey, O friend. — Aliette De Bodard

It's a great historical joke that when the Spanish met the Aztecs, it was a blind date made in serve-you-right heaven. At the time, they were the two most unpleasant cultures in the entire world, and richly deserved each other. Still, the story of how stout Cortes blustered, bullied and bludgeoned his way to collapsing an entire empire with a handful of contagious hoodlums is astonishing. — A.A. Gill

The Aztecs invented the wheel, but didn't know how to use it except as a children's toy. Even though they built roads that to us scream out to have a wheel put on them, nonetheless they continued to drag things around. The society itself was blind to the possibilities. — Walter Murch

I still couldn't banish the image of the Quetzal Flower. In my mind, it merged with that of Priestess Eleuia: everything a man could desire or aspire to, a woman who would suck the marrow from your bones and still leave you smiling. — Aliette De Bodard

Another of the great civilizations, the Aztecs, raised a breed of hairless chihuahuas especially for eating. When the Conquistadors arrived and found dog on the menu, they were of the same opinion as Mademoiselle, that this was evidence of the worst form of barbarism. They, the Spaniards, used dogs as befits civilized and Christian men - to hunt down fugitive Indians and tear them to pieces. — Medlar Lucan

Throughout Mesoamerica it was a common belief that a dog carried the soul of a newly deceased person across a body of water. According to the Aztecs, the first level of the Underworld was a place called Apanoayan (where one crosses the river) or Itzcuintlan (the Place of Dogs). — Elizabeth Eiler

If the Aztecs saw Giza, they would have called Menkaure - the Pyramid of the Moon. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

Consider the wave of revulsion that floods the average person when he or she hears of the practice of human sacrifice by the Aztecs and other so-called primitive peoples. How savage and barbaric such practices seem. But when a Christian or Jew comes across human sacrifice in the Bible (see Jephthah's immolation of his daughter in Judges 11:30-40), is he or she repulsed? — Steve Allen

The country will some day pay for the stupidities of those who were in the majority on this commission. They know as much about the future of aviation as they do about the sign writing of the Aztecs. — Jimmy Doolittle

That was when the Spanish came in and conquered the Aztecs. I thought that was a clever thing. — Les Baxter

This fifth and final sun will die,
Like every sun before
But for a moment we laughed in its light,
Like wind-blown petals
Sparkling near an exile's campfire
Before the flames take them. — David Bowles

Among the Aztecs, for example, who had a number of heavens to which people's souls would be assigned according to the conditions of their death, the heaven for warriors killed in battle was the same for mothers who died in childbirth. Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another. — Joseph Campbell

Patriarchy has been the normal in almost all agricultural and industrial societies. ...If patriarchy in Afro-Asia resulted from some chance occurrence, why were the Aztecs and Incas patriarchal? It is far more likely that even though the precise definition of man and woman varies between cultures, there is some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood. We do not know what this reason is; there are plenty of theories, none of the convincing. — Yuval Noah Harari

Moviewise, I would love to make the story of princess Erendira. She was a 16 year old princess/warrior who led her tribe in war against the Spanish around 1513. She almost defeated them, and the Tarascans were the only tribe the Aztecs couldn't defeat. — Tamara Feldman

Aztecs had not only failed to repress the eating of enemy dead,
they were practicing a state-sponsored form of human sacrifice
and cannibalism on a scale never rivaled before or since. — Marvin Harris

The Aztecs believe they started up in what's now New Mexico, and wandered for 10,000 years before they got down into where they are now, in Mexico City. That's a weird legend. — Jerry Pournelle

Human nature doesn't change, Randy. Education is hopeless. The most educated people in the world can turn into Aztecs or Nazis just like that. He snaps his fingers. — Neal Stephenson

Rome versus the Visigoths, Ancient Egypt versus the Hyksos, Aztecs versus the Spaniards. — Margaret Atwood

both the Egyptian [and] American pyramids, the outside of the structures was covered with a thick coating of smooth, shining cement." "The Aztecs, like the Egyptians, had progressed through all the three different modes of writing - the picture-writing, the symbolical, and the phonetic. They recorded all their laws, their tribute-rolls specifying the various imposts, their mythology, astronomical calendars, and rituals, their political annals and their chronology. They wrote on cotton-cloth, on skins prepared like parchment, on a composition of silk and gum, and on a species of paper, soft and beautiful, made from the aloe. Their books were about — Dennis Brooks

The Mexicans have a fervent appreciation of poetry and make regular use of it. It occupies a high and ancient seat in the Mexican culture. The Aztecs called it "a scattering of jades," jade being what they valued most, far more than the gold for which they were murdered in great numbers by invading Spaniards. They felt that the more profound aspects of certain concepts, whether emotional, philosophical, political, or artistic, could be expressed only in poetry. — Linda Ronstadt

Now the moon of the Aztecs is at the zenith, and all the world lies still. Full and white, the white of bones, the white of a skull; blistering the center of the sky well with its throbbing, not touching it on any side. Now the patio is a piebald place of black and white, burning in the downward-teeming light. Not a leaf moves, not a petal falls, in this fierce amalgam. ("The Moon Of Montezuma") — Cornell Woolrich

He thought of death in its infinite groanings, of Aztecs ripping out living hearts and of cancer and three-year-olds buried alive and he wondered whether God was alien and cruel, but then remembered Beethoven and the dappling of things and "Hurrah for Karamazov" and kindness. He — William Peter Blatty

But even among the great traditional peoples, the situation is not different: from China to Greece, from Rome to the primordial Nordic groups, then up to Aztecs and the Incas, nobility was not characterised by the simple fact of having ancestors, but by the fact that the ancestors of the nobility were divine, unlike those of plebeians and to which it can remain faithful, also through the integrity of blood. The nobles originated from 'demigods', that is to say, from beings who had actually followed a transcendent form of life, forming the origin of tradition in the higher sense, transmitting to their lineage a blood made divine, and, along with it, rites, that is, determinate operations, whose secret every noble family preserved, which allowed their descendants to continue the spiritual conquest from where it had previously reached, and to lead it from the virtual to the actual. — Julius Evola

There were car gods there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs. — Neil Gaiman

All the earth is a grave, and nought escapes it; nothing is so perfect that it does not fall and disappear. The rivers, brooks, fountains and waters flow on, and never return to their joyous beginnings; they hasten on to the vast realms of Tlaloc, and the wider they spread between their marges the more rapidly do they mould their own sepulchral urns. That which was yesterday is not to-day; and let not that which is to-day trust to live to-morrow. — Daniel G. Brinton

The Aztecs and the Elizabethans looked into their mirrors to discern danger. Today those who peer into the future want only relief from anxiety. Unable to face the prospect that the cycles of war will continue, they are desperate to find a pattern of improvement in history. It is only natural that believers in reason, lacking any deeper faith and too feeble to tolerate doubt, should turn to the sorcery of numbers. Happily there are some who are ready to assist them. Just as the Elizabethan magus transcribed tables shown to him by angels, the modern scientific scryer deciphers numerical auguries of angels hidden in ourselves. — John N. Gray

The magnitude of these shattering changes can perhaps be grasped by imagining that the invasion had been in the reverse direction and that the Aztecs or Incas had arrived suddenly in Europe, imposed their culture and calendar, outlawed Christianity, set up sacrificial altars for thousands of victims in Madrid and Amsterdam, unwittingly spread disease on a scale that virtually matched the Black Death, melted down the golden images of Christ and the saints, threw stones at the stained-glass windows and converted the cathedral aisles into arms or food warehouses, toppled unfamiliar Greek statues and Roman columns, and carried home to the Mexican and Peruvian highlands their loot in precious metals along with slaves, indentured servants and other human trophies. — Geoffrey Blainey

In the place of the bells, where battle is waged,
The reeds all lie broken in Chalco today.
Dust yellows the air, our houses are smoking,
The sobbing is rising - from the lips of your Chalcans! — David Bowles

Who could truly set His shield to rest?
His throne? His mighty spear?
Think on that. Remember it well, O princes.
Who could lay waste to Tenochtitlan?
Who dares assail the foundation of heaven? — David Bowles

It is evident that a man with a scientific outlook on life cannot let himself be intimidated by texts of Scripture or by the teaching of the Church. He will not be content to say "such-and-such an act is sinful, and that ends the matter." He will inquire whether it does any harm or whether, on the contrary, the belief that it is sinful does harm. And he will find that, especially in what concerns sex, our current morality contains a very great deal of which the origin is purely superstitious. He will find also that this superstition, like that of the Aztecs, involves needless cruelty, and would be swept away if people were actuated by kindly feelings towards their neighbors. But the defenders of traditional morality are seldom people with warm hearts ... One is tempted to think that they value morals as affording a legitimate outlet for their desire to inflict pain; the sinner is fair game, and therefore away with tolerance! — Bertrand Russell