End Of An Empire Quotes & Sayings

Empire as located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. — J.M. Coetzee

The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband. — Richard Russo

Having confronted the world with little except a battered typewriter and a certain resilience, he can now take posthumous credit for having got the three great questions of the 20th century essentially 'right.' Orwell was an early and consistent foe of European imperialism, and foresaw the end of colonial rule. He was one of the first to volunteer to bear arms against fascism and Nazism in Spain. And, while he was soldiering in Catalonia, he saw through the biggest and most seductive lie of them all - the false promise of a radiant future offered by the intellectual underlings of Stalinism. — Christopher Hitchens

In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated.
Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman empire or Egypt with the last pharaoh abdicating in 1912. For China, the last century has been a period of transition - dramatic change and perpetual revolution. — Mark Kurlansky

You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts. — China Mieville

A major cause of the Roman Empire's decline, after six centuries of world dominance was its replacement of stone aqueducts by lead pipes for the transport and supply of drinking water. Roman engineers, the best in the world, turned their fellow citizens into cripples. Today our own "best and brightest," with the best of intentions, achieve the same end through childhood vaccination programmes yielding the modern scourges of hyperactivity, learning disabilities, autism, appetite disorders, and impulsive violence. — Harris L Coulter

We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word ... Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests. Finally, they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ. — Martin Luther King Jr.

In England, the population explosion can be linked very clearly with the enclosure of the commons that uprooted the peasants from their land. In India, it was the same thing: the population increased at the end of the 18th century when the British took over and Indian lands were colonized. Instead of the land feeding Indian people it started to feed the British empire. So we had destitution. Destitute people who don't have their own land to feed themselves can only feed themselves by having larger numbers, therefore they multiply. It's the rational response of a dispossessed people. — Vandana Shiva

In the end it seems we're just toys, easy to break and hard to mend. — Mark Lawrence

What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war? — Zbigniew Brzezinski

The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes; and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible. — Francis Bacon

The end of war begins with people who believe that another world is possible and that another empire has already interrupted time and space and is taking over this earth with the dreams of God. — Shane Claiborne

America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal. And we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words, within our borders and around the world. We are shaped by every culture. Drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept, E pluribus unum: Out of many, one. — Barack Obama

He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist. — Milan Kundera

Now these ashes have grown cold, we open the old book.
These oil-stained pages recount the tales of the Fallen,
a frayed empire, words without warmth. The hearth
has ebbed, its gleam and life's sparks are but memories
against dimming eyes - what cast my mind, what hue my
thoughts as I open the Book of the Fallen
and breathe deep the scent of history?
Listen, then, to these words carried on that breath.
These tales are the tales of us all, again yet again.
We are history relived and that is all, without end that is all. — Steven Erikson

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

You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. — Doris Lessing

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

For instance, a new kind of rich person named John Henry bought the Florida Marlins in January 1999. Most baseball owners were either heirs, or empire builders of one sort or another, or both. Henry had made his money in the intelligent end of the financial markets. He had an instinctive feel for the way statistical analysis could turn up inefficiencies in human affairs. Inefficiencies in the financial markets had made Henry a billionaire - and he saw some familiar idiocies in the market for baseball players. — Anonymous

Zhou," Biyu said, when Sabaa paused, "before the Jade Emperor, humans were just like the beasts in the field. We ate, lived and reproduced, but we were going nowhere. The universe is order in all its perfection, stagnant and unchanging. The wars set us free. Free to change, to learn, to adapt, to become more than we were. To do that, we sacrificed order for a measure of chaos, of challenge. It let some people, men and women, do evil, but even that inspired many more to do good. Medicines, writing, music, architecture, all the accomplishments of your Empire came at a high price, but it was worth paying. Tonight we reaffirm that fact. Without the power we grant the Jade Emperor from the realms we represent, we would lose all that we have gained. The universe would reassert its control. Over the years, order would take charge once more and progress would end. Given time, our race would slide back into the beasts we were once. It is something we could not survive. — G.R. Matthews

Part of Sykes's motive was rooted in religiosity. A devout Catholic, he regarded a return of the ancient tribe of Israel to the Holy Land as a way to correct
a nearly two-thousand-year-old wrong. That view had taken on new passion and
urgency with the massacres of the Armenians. To Sykes, in that ongoing atrocity, the Ottoman Empire had proven it could never again be trusted to protect
its religious minority populations. At war's end, the Christian and Jewish Holy
Land of Palestine would be taken from it, and the failure of the Crusades made
right. — Scott Anderson

Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers. This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire. — Nouriel Roubini

We can safely make one prophecy: whatever the outcome of this war, the British Empire is at an end. It has been mortally wounded. The future of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis in their cursed island. (4th February 1945) — Adolf Hitler

(Rather in the way that the Roman Empire continued in a certain fashion to run itself even when there was no one left to run it and the reason behind it was entirely gone, much of this routine remained intact even during the terrible days after Bunny's death. Up until the very end there was always, always, Sunday-night dinner at Charles and Camilla's, except on the evening of the murder itself, when no one felt much like eating and it was postponed until Monday.) I — Donna Tartt

Poor, unhappy Erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be 'some one,' like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with, when, with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the entire empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. Ah, yes, we must need pity the Opera ghost ... — Gaston Leroux

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

A nations path to greatness lies in its economic prowess and that militarism, empire, and aggression lead to a dead end. — Fareed Zakaria

America certainly did its part. But doing the sums, it is now clear that through the eight years of Ronald Reagan's presidency, 1981-89, Saudi Arabia actually provided more material assistance to the world's varied assortment of anti Communist "freedom fighters" than did the United States, thus hastening the end of the Cold War and helping accomplish the downfall of the "Evil Empire. — Robert Lacey

It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence. — D.H. Lawrence

The Empire is a thug, a bully. It's no better than Surat Nuat, or Black Sun, or the syndicate of Hutts. 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. — Chuck Wendig

In a duel, man to man, sword against sword, it can be a lack of skill that gets you killed. Often as not, though, it'll be a matter of luck, or if it goes on too long, then it'll be the man who tires first that tends to die.
In the end it's about staying power. They should put that on headstones, Got tired. — Mark Lawrence

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

But sometimes, I feel like something's missing, and I can't quite put my finger on it. That little something extra. Excitement. A challenge. An adventure. Maybe I should bungee jump off of the empire state building or run naked in central park. Nah, that would just be plain crazy, and I'd get arrested. That wouldn't end up well. Unless there was a hot guy dressed in a uniform fingerprinting me. Then it might just be worth it. — Beth Michele

She'd done better than most; it would take the Empire a whole battle station to end her. — Alexander Freed

The boy is young, only twelve standard years, not old enough to fight. Not yet. He looks to his father with pleading eyes. Over the din he yells: "But the battle station was destroyed, Dad! The battle is over!" They just watched it only an hour before. The supposed end of the Empire. The start of something better. The confusion in the boy's shining eyes is clear: He doesn't understand what's happening. But Rorak does. He's heard tales of the Clone Wars - tales spoken by his own father. He knows how war goes. It's not many wars, but just one, drawn out again and again, cut up into slices so it seems more manageable. — Chuck Wendig

Nations rise, they flourish for a time, and then they decline. Eventually every empire comes to an end; not even the greatest can last forever. — Billy Graham

I am the Empire at the end of the decadence. — Paul Verlaine

By the time that the war came to an end, British society was generally inclined to reject the idealistic case for imperialism (that it would extend the benefits of advanced civilization to a backward region) as quixotic, and the practical case for it (that it would be of benefit to Britain to expand her empire) as untrue. — David Fromkin

The Society of Muslim Brothers was founded in 1928 by a young schoolteacher named Hasan al-Banna. As a Sunni Islamic revivalist movement, its establishment followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the subsequent end of the caliphate system of government that had united the Muslims for many hundreds of years. Al-Banna, who was just twenty-two years old, believed Islam was not only a religion but a fully comprehensive way of life, based on the tenets of Wahhabism, a strict and repressive form of the religion better known these days as Islamism and espoused by the Saudis, as well as unsavory characters such as Osama bin Laden. — Dan Eaton

In the end it may well be that Britain will be honored by the historians more for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it. — David Ormsby-Gore, 5th Baron Harlech

With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy. — Grace Lee Boggs

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

But in the end you cannot serve two masters, Theos and Elohim, the god of the Greco-Roman philosophers and Caesars and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the violent god of profit proclaimed by the empire and the compassionate God of justice proclaimed by the prophets. You can try to hybridize them and compromise them for centuries, but like oil and water they eventually separate and prove incompatible. They refuse to alloy. They produce irreconcilable narratives and create different worlds. — Brian D. McLaren

In the end though, everybody dies, but not everybody lives - the climber, though he may die young, will have lived. — Mark Lawrence

Success always calls for greater generosity - though most people, lost in the darkness of their own egos, treat it as an occasion for greater greed. Collecting boot is not an end itself, but only a means for building an empire. Riches would be of little use to us now - except as a means of winning new friends. — Cyrus The Great

You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?"
"That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant.
I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about. — Flann O'Brien

Why did you want to go and distract me like that? I was quite in my element and everything.' Conall laughed. 'Someone has to keep you off balance; otherwise you'll end up ruling the empire. Or at least ordering it into wretched submission. — Gail Carriger

The year 1453, therefore, marks the end of the Roman Empire. No one can fail to be amazed by the almost constant successes of the Ottoman armies, which developed in less than two centuries from a small group of fighters who waged war around their gazi in Eastern Anatolia into a force whose power reached the shores of the Bosphorus and the palace of Justinian's successors. How — Andre Clot

There is plenty of other evidence, however, that the nominal conversion of the Roman Empire to the Christian religion had effected no visible improvement in the common morals. The world was worse rather than better. Out of its besetting temptations men fled to save their souls. They fled from the world, which in the first century was believed by the Christians to be doomed, and liable to be destroyed by divine fire before the end of the year, and which in the fourth century was believed by the Christians to be damned: it belonged to the devil. They fled also from the church, which they accused of secularity and of hypocrisy. Many of the monks were laymen, who in deep disgust had forsaken the services and sacraments. They said their own prayers and sought God in their own way, asking no aid from priests. They were men who had resolved never to go to church again. — George Hodges

Melletin jumped up on a barrel beside Ramil. "Brigardians, are you with the Dark Prince?"

"Aye!" shouted his countrymen.

"What about you other men?" Ramil asked, looking across the crowd of faces drawn from all parts of the Empire.

The slave who had challenged him took one look at Yelena, then raised his hand. "I'm in. It seems you might know what you're doing after all."

Ramil grinned. "I can't promise that--but I can promise that I'll buy you a drink if we're still alive by the end of tomorrow! — Julia Golding

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

The Roman Empire came to an end, but the Roman people didn't come to an end, so I see the American Empire coming to an end just as other empires have come to an end. — Howard Zinn

Ferguson argued that British involvement in World War I was unnecessary, far too costly in lives and money for any advantage gained, and a Pyrrhic victory that in many ways contributed to the end of the Empire. — David Harsanyi

When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s, what I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire
nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence? — Doris Lessing

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old. — Winston S. Churchill

For starters, this country embodies something utterly unique: History's first democratic empire. Beginning in the post war era, we have used free trade and democracy to create a series of interlocking relationships that end war. — Armstrong Williams

Who gives an empire, by the gift defeats All end of giving; and procures contempt Instead of gratitude. — Edward Young

We have decided to bring to an end the most unequal, most unjust, most barbarous war of our age, and have chosen the road to exile in order that our people will not be exterminated and in order to consecrate ourselves wholly and in peace to the preservation of our empire's independence. — Haile Selassie

As for the human case, the generation of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire - so significant to those involved - are not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope. — Gore Vidal

To me the greatest possible horror is not that humanity might end, but that our Empire of Stupidity might last forever. — M. Suddain

The Empire is in chaos. As the old order crumbles, the fledgling New Republic seeks a swift end to the galactic conflict. Many Imperial leaders have fled from their posts, hoping to escape justice in the farthest corners of known space. — Chuck Wendig

When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires. — Doris Lessing

When I started the 'Broken Empire' trilogy, I thought it was a short story, and I didn't know the beginning, middle, or end of even that. — Mark Lawrence

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

He had a heart that could have held the entire empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. — Gaston Leroux

For it all, we gladly sacrifice. With it all, we proudly defend." Spoken first by a Sirunre citizen, a member of the Kingdom Alliance of the Empire Seas. — A.W.Chrystalis