Empires Rise And Fall Quotes & Sayings

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die. — Kevin J. Anderson

Economic systems rise and fall just like empires. That's the kind of perspective we need to take if we hope to prosper for centuries rather than for the next quarter. — Annalee Newitz

Though the general principles of statecraft have survived the rise and fall of empires, every increase in knowledge has brought about changes in the political, economic, and social structure. — John Boyd Orr

Can you see air you breathe? Can you see the force that moves the tides or changes the seasons or sends the birds to a winter haven?" Her eyes welled. "Can Rome with all its knowledge be so foolish? Oh Marcus, you can't carve God in stone. You can't limit him to a temple. You can't imprison him on a mountaintop. Heaven is his throne; earth, his footstool. Everything you see is his. Empires will rise and empires will fall. Only God prevails. — Francine Rivers

Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America - burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

Augustine recast how people should view history, that history was not the story of the rise and fall of empires because those are human things. Those are the city of man. Rather, true history should be the history of salvation, of man moving toward God. It's a focus that takes the light off of this world and shines it much more brightly on the next world. — Thomas F. Madden

Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity! — Iain M. Banks

Empires rise and fall like the abdomen of God. It's just the universe breathing. — Wes Nisker

Kvothe continued, smiling himself "I see you laugh. Very well, for simplicity's sake, let us assume I am the center of creation. In doing this, let us pass over innumerable boring stories: the rise and fall of empires, sagas of heroism, ballads of tragic love. Let us hurry forward to the only tale of any real importance." His smile broadened. "Mine. — Patrick Rothfuss

None of them understand ... they can't see the enormity of time the way I can, the way it swallows all our striving ... they want to live solely in the moment, not realizing that for our kind the moment never ends. Empires have come and gone, continents have been discovered and populated from shore to shore, men have walked on the moon, wars have consumed the planet ... everything dies, but we remain. We are witnesses to the endless decay of the world. No matter how high we rise, eventually ... ashes to ashes, we all fall down. — Dianne Sylvan

The coin turns; where it falls, nobody knows.
The coin turns, empires rise and empires fall, men live and men die, babies scream and dead men sigh; the world changes but people are always and are never the same. — Claire North

That is the great mistake about the affections. It is not the rise and fall of empires, the birth and death of kings, or the marching of armies that move them most. When they answer from their depths, it is to the domestic joys and tragedies of life. — Amelia Barr

All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,' the other man said to me during our initial meeting. 'Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by - whether it's religious scriptures or makeshift slogans - all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires - show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there - ' he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, 'show business, show business, show business.' 'And what about dreams?' I asked, thinking I might have hit upon an exception to his dogmatic view, or at least one that he would accept as such. 'You mean the dreams of the sort we are having at this moment or the ones we have when we're fortunate enough to sleep? — Thomas Ligotti

I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction. — Martin Scorsese

But not she. Her eternity is an article of her faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, woman, is perpetual, essential; she will go on for ever. — John Wyndham

All empires fall, eventually."
"But why? It's not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those who have known nothing else. Who have no comprehension of the need to rise above base desires.["] — Max Barry

Modern empires rise and fall not on armies, ideology, or violence, but on the instantaneous flow of capital. - Boris Karpov — Eric Van Lustbader

There are certain mistakes that you know you just have to make, know you're going to make, no matter what conscience, logic or fear are telling you. It's a simple truth of human existence. Across thousands of years of civilisation, throughout the rise and fall of empires and our stumbling ascent from the forests to the stars, greater men than Zal had contemplated the wisdom of their intentions before coming to exactly the same conclusion.
And there was usually a girl involved, yeah. — Christopher Brookmyre