Best 92 quotes in «empire quotes» category

Sumone Yiden Smiff was a businessman of note. Was, past tense. Through years of sweat and swearing and amazingly smart (or lucky) deals he’d built up a mining empire that spanned the sum of known space. At 74 years, he had reached the apex of a career stretching half a century. His companies mined precious commodities like Impervium, Obstinatium and Bitanium. He wasn’t really famous, or ostentatious. In fact he only ever made the cover of Fortune One Billion once, twenty-five years ago. He’d never married, had lots of children – light-years apart, apparently.

Terrorism is vicious, ugly, and dehumanizing for its perpetrators as well as its victims. But so is war. You could says that terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war. They are people who don't believe that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

That's how tyranny succeeds. When folks think it won't affect them until eventually it does.

The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretence, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists.

The crescent moon in the sky appeared and disappeared between the branches and the thickets, or behind the playful diaphanous night clouds, like the jewel in the crown that shines or blurs according to the destiny of the empire.

The empires collapsed to rubble. Skyscrapers dragged down to the ground. It was chaos. I could smell the end. It smells of tequila, cannabis, and strawberry shampoo. It's so cold so cold so cold. But I'm not shivering from cold. My own teeth are frigid icepicks. Carved diamond hard, I think I've cut my lip. Maybe it was someone else's teeth that nipped me.

The creation within the space of a single century of a vast Arab Empire stretching from Spain to India is one of the most extraordinary marvels of history.

The mind is an empire unto itself.

The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from principle, in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace, and laid in principles purely pacific.

The Sun Tzu School (which wrote the Art of War) surely never imagined that their antiwar, pro-empire treatise would become known and accepted after the fall of the first empire as a text on military tactics. Likewise, they would have been surprised to see the Ping-fa military metaphor—an inspired teaching device—come to be seen as the message and not the medium.

There are no moral obligations in the game of empire.

The sun's glow had given way to a brilliant twilight that colored the great mountains with violet and orange rivers.

This is my empire, Uriang-Khadai. I will not be made to leave. Ready the tumans for battle, Orlok. I will face my enemies and I will destroy them.

the wages of empire is myopia

Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus - for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork - sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes.

this supercluster has to be Jurassic Park on crack

Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood’s forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth… Rousseau said that the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his or her own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property was the one who invented evil. Good, on the contrary, is what is common.

Violence and resistance are the only answer. Empire has to feel pain or it will never stop devouring you. It is only when a gun is put in a person’s face that anything changes. All empires are hungry cannibals...

We ought not to speak only about the economics of globalization, but about the psychology of globalization. It's like the psychology of a battered woman being faced with her husband again and being asked to trust him again. That's what is happening. We are being asked by the countries that invented nuclear weapons and chemical weapons and apartheid and modern slavery and racism - countries that have perfected the gentle art of genocide, that colonized other people for centuries - to trust them when they say that they believe in a level playing field and the equitable distribution of resources and in a better world. It seems comical that we should even consider that they really mean what they say.

What does a great empire do when faced with imminent invasion and destruction? It can rearm at home and seek allies abroad; but more cunningly it can revisit its history to forge a myth that will unite the people and carry them through to victory, a myth that will demonstrate to everyone that their country has been specially chosen by history to uphold justice and righteousness.

When avarice takes the lead in a state, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall.

What is Empire? Empire cannot be tasted or touched. You cannot smell it or breathe it or fuck it. It is not a fleet or a capital or a person. It is a story that is only real as long as people keep telling it. So we are not attacking a fleet or a capital or people. We are attacking the story. We are attacking the symbols that roar and screech at the heart of that story. That is how we will uproot and destroy Empire.

Why do you accept being treated like an inmate?

When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don't think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world - other voices, other people.

You cannot build an empire hands folded.

A house you build with your hands, but an empire you build with your heart.

You strike me as a good man, Commander, but where the good are put in charge of the wicked, empires will be destroyed. It is when the wicked are given oversight of the good, does empire become strong.

You don't need to work hard to earn an empire; there is an army of slaves to do it for you.

America's over. Get out while you still can.

Altogether, humankind had spread over less than one-eighth of the galaxy. Expansion was somewhat self-limiting. The U.S. had not been able to hold a colony at two hundred light-years distance. At fifteen hundred light-years, most nations could consider their colonies temporary holdings. Any people it took you two months to reach were not going to pay your taxes or obey your laws. That was human nature. - Wolf Star, Tour of the Merrimack #2

An Oak tree is a daily reminder that great things often have small beginnings.

As the map of the Great Plain was being redrawn by a young Shazarian councillor, the ageing Shylonian king interrupted mid-speech to ask him his name. With a piercing glare and a haughty flick of his cloak, he retorted ‘Lord Ratilla, Shazarian Imperial Secretary, and who might you be?’ Behind the gasps of horror, the message was clear. It was Shazaria who now bestrode the Amaran world, henceforth the office of Shazarian minister now held greater prestige than even that of foreign monarchs. What became even clearer were the depths of Shazarian treachery. The impudent youth who stood before the kings of Amara stripping them of ancient provinces, was the same adolescent reputed to have delivered an eloquent speech which swayed the Shazarian councillors in favour of war. Had this been their intention all along?

Any government that places profit before people is pure evil.

A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.

As Samson demonstrated, going bald ruins lives.

before humanity chokes (or basks) in the dungeon (or paradise) of a Western-centered global empire or of an East Asian-centered world-market society, “it might well burn up in the horrors (or glories) of the escalating violence that has accompanied the liquidation of the Cold War world order.

Because the Empire controls the media, we can turn any news to the Emperor's advantage.

Building castles in the air is only wise if you build a ladder to reach them.

But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand's-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth.

But I hated the Emperor of the Ke-Han with everything I had in me, for every man I'd lost and every friend who'd died, for every story I'd known was false but had allowed to harden my heart against the enemy anyway.

Do not build a castle around one act of kindness; do not build an empire around one act of cruelty.

Colonized painting, for instance, is balanced between poles. From excessive submission to Europe resulting in depersonalization, it passes to such a violent return to self that it is obnoxious and esthetically illusory. The right balance not being found, the self-accusation continues. Before and during the revolt, the colonized always considers the colonizer as a model or as an antithesis. He continues to struggle against him. He was torn between what he was and what he wanted to be, and now he is making of himself. Nonetheless, the painful discord with himself continues. In order to witness the colonized's complete cure, his alienation must completely cease. We must await the complete disappearance of colonization--including the period of revolt.

Cody probably wasn’t in danger either, but he wasn’t willing to risk it when these might also be good guys that he might need later to help him sneak into some forgotten city win himself an empire at the price of gallons of blood...

Crowns are hourly tumbling.

Esta es una revolución que ningún poder logrará controlar porque biopoder y comunismo, cooperación y revolución, permanecen juntos, en amor, simplicidad y también inocencia. Esta es la irreprimible alegría y gozo de ser comunistas.

Do you know why empires fall? Because they can no longer believe their own lies.

Empire– in essence nothing but mechanisms for exploiting coloured labor.

Empires fall and drag their brands of civilization down with them.

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.

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.