Empire Quotes

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
― Arundhati Roy, War Talk

“We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.”
― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns

“Only he who has no use for the empire is fit to be entrusted with it.”
― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

“A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“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.”
― Antonio Negri Michael Hardt, Impero

“Truth-telling is a delicate dance between exposure and imposture, a dance whose steps I’m beginning to learn. When Theodora found me in the scriptorium, I was twenty-one. Still young, but I’d seen enough to feel old.”
― Carol Strickland, The Eagle and the Swan

“The sun's glow had given way to a brilliant twilight that colored the great mountains with violet and orange rivers.”
― Michael R. Hicks

“Rebuild your world, rebuild your race, rebuild your empire. Rebuild it all. But make sure you rebuild your ideals too. Rebuild the principles that made you a great and honorable galactic power in the first place. Don't prey on the weak. Don't steal from the helpless. Don't murder the innocent. Be a force for good, not a force for yourself.”
― Dan Abnett, Doctor Who: The Silent Stars Go By

“The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty.”
― J. M. Coetzee, Aspettando i barbari

“This great Mughal Emperor [Akbar] was illiterate; he could neither read nor write. However, that had not stopped Akbar from cultivating the acquaintance of the most learned and cultured poets, authors, musicians, and architects of the time - relying solely on his remarkable memory during conversations with them.”
― Indu Sundaresan, The Twentieth Wife

“America's over. Get out while you still can.”
― J.M. Porup

“Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.”
― Alain Badiou

“Has there ever been a country that, once colonized, avoided civil war?”
― Roma Tearne, Mosquito

“Take heart, sir," Cazaril consoled him. "It is not your destiny today to win a royacy for your son. It is to win an empire for your grandson.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

“... instead of trying to grapple with the implications of the story of empire, the British seem to have decided just to ignore it... the most corrosive part of this amnesia is a sense that because the nation is not what it was, it can never be anything again.”
― Jeremy Paxman, Empire

“How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power?

Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer to this fundamental question. The state must be large in territory and self-sufficient in economics, with a balance between industry and agriculture that supported a hardily conformist and ideologically motivated citizenry capable of fulfilling historical prophecies - either Stalinist internal industrialization or Nazi colonial agrarianism. Both Hitler and Stalin aimed at imperial autarky, within a large land empire well supplies in food, raw materials, and mineral resources. Both understood the flash appeal of modern materials: Stalin had named himself after steel, and Hitler paid special attention to is production. Yet both Stalin and Hitler understood agriculture as a key element in the completion of their revolutions. Both believed that their systems would prove their superiority to decadent capitalism, and guarantee independence from the rest of the world, by the production of food.

p. 158”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“But you, Roman, must remember that you have to guide the nations by your authority, for this is to be your skill, to graft tradition onto peace, to shew mercy to the conquered, and to wage war until the haughty are brought low.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“Why do you accept being treated like an inmate?”
― Antonio Negri, Declaration

“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, The Western Lands

“Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire . . . is one Monarch and one Sword.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Christopher Unborn

“As Samson demonstrated, going bald ruins lives.”
― Brendan Jack, EMPIRE: How to Succeed with Nothing but Passion, Great Ideas and a Wealthy Family

“this supercluster has to be Jurassic Park on crack”
― Andrew Hennessey

“Вони вважали, як ти: що ліпше бути слугою імперії, терпіти жорстоке приниження, ніж опиратися. Бо так безпечніше. Так стабільніше, так вони могли вижити. І саме так імперія перемагає. Вони нацьковують нас одне на одного. Розділяють нас.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“The government cannot compete with an empire.”
― Nikki Elizabeth, Part Two: Execution

“Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.”
― Dean Acheson

“…I think the moment we root our worth in castes and kingdoms, in ‘civilization,’ we have accepted the precepts of those whose whole entire legacy is the burning and flooding of a planet. And then we have already lost.
I am trying to urge you toward something new—not simply against their myths of conquest, but against the urge to craft your own.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“All the world hails me as emperor and god, yet I still wear the flesh of a man.”
― Gaius Julius Caesar

“I stared high at the clouds, casting shadows across that untouched orchard. Without blinking, I told the Crocodile:
“Whenever I try to shape my world, I end up destroying it.”

He turned my chin, so I met his gaze - which had grown uncharacteristically soft - and said:
“That is a lie told to subdue slaves, who outnumber their masters. It is the lie on which every empire is built.”
― Jordan Ifueko, The Maid and the Crocodile

“Romans shall never go to that land where our legions were slaughtered. Roman law now forbids that!”
― Michael G. Kramer, Full Story of the Anglo-Saxon Invasion