Empire Quotes

“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

“I'm afraid, you're right...though not only of them. We'll lose everything, including the way we live,' Hussein said. 'And these young people will lose even more. One day they'll make them spit on all that we know, and will make them recite their laws and their story of the world as if it were the holy word. When they come to write about us, what will they say? That we made slaves.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise

“I guess research isn’t for everyone.”
“Certainly not for the faint of heart or the unfaithful.”
― James Luceno, Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel

“Only the empire uses this word, because you assume who lives on the steppe is the same. Naimads are not Ketreyids. Call us by our names.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic

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

“You hear your Oriental friends called 'greasy little babus', and you admit, dutifully, that they ARE greasy little babus. You see louts fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants. The time comes when you burn with hatred of your own countrymen, when you long for a native rising to drown their Empire in blood. And in this there is nothing honourable, hardly even any sincerity. For, au fond, what do you care if the Indian Empire is a despotism, if Indians are bullied and exploited? You only care because the right of free speech is denied you. You are a creature of the despotism, a pukka sahib, tied tighter than a monk or a savage by an unbreakable system of tabus.”
― George Orwell, Burmese days

“One cannot have everything, or the Gods would come to envy mortals. Is that not what happened to the Callatians? They built their towers too close to heaven, challenged the Gods with their accomplishments, and for it their Empire was destroyed?”
― Cassandra Clare, Sword Catcher

“Let the glory of the empire goes to the crow.
Just want to retire after twenty-five years of brawl.
Give me a small farm in the wilderness to live.
Keep me alive. I return to a lovely wife-to-be.”
― Asvoria K., Teleios: Flaw, is Perfect!

“Witch trials were not just misogynist festivals of torture and hatred; they also directly facilitated the building of empire.”
― Marion Gibson, Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials

“Once again, the Empire of Russia has defeated the nation. It is important to recognize it now, when Russia is suffering a moral, military and, broadly speaking, civilizational defeat in Ukraine. The attack on Ukraine is a fiasco of the still-born idea of ‘the Russian world,’ russky mir, as one lot of Russian speakers bomb, torture and shoot other Russian speakers; as they burn Orthodox churches and demolish Russian-speaking cities of Mariupol and Kherson. This is not a war for Russia but for the re-establishment of the Empire, a war of revenge on Ukrainians (it is even crueller, because they are considered ‘one of us,’ ‘our brothers’) for daring to think that they could break away and follow their own path.”
― Sergei Medvedev, A War Made in Russia

“Britain’s comfortable indulgences - its infrastructure, its economy, its food supplies - depend on modern slavery, its wealth and resources on thousands of brown and Black bodies murdered during empire. Britain lives in terrible denial, I know now, of a history it can’t admit to. And it survives that denial by indicating to people of colour, very subtly, very passively, that they shouldn’t think of themselves as real. Because if no one real was hurt, then no real harm has been done.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“We talk about creating an utopia, but we install an empire and we build our success on the back of the exploited.

We talk about equality, but we ignore the power structures that silence the voices of the less powerful.

We talk about meritocracy, but we only promote and care for those from the core planets.

We talk about science and rationality, but we pray to extinct gods and worship mutated humans.”
― Maya Darjani, Ancient as the Stars

“He was trained to be an apostle of Western civilization: to go forth and convert the world to capitalism and Christianity, to transform pastures into plantations and huts into hotels, to introduce to those living in the stone age, the marvels of the steam engine and locomotive, and to ensure that the sun never set on the British empire.”
― David Grann, Simon Schuster Ltd The Lost City of Z A Legendary British Explorers Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon.

“A history which spans thousands of years, encompassing the rise and fall of empires and of peoples, makes it difficult—if not impossible—to believe in the permanent superiority of any race or culture.”
― Thomas Sowell

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

“She was working for the Empire, a thing she had sworn she would never do, helping design a vessel that would, in all probability, be the most fearsome weapon the galaxy had ever seen. While it was true that improving the biometrics and seating pattern in an assembly hall was not the same as devising a superlaser that could melt moons, still…
Still, one was either a factor in something’s success, or a factor in its failure.
Working for the enemy, said the little voice she sometimes heard in her head. She often visualized it as a miniature version of herself, shaking a chastising finger. How sad is that?
Not as if I had a choice, is it? she replied mentally. Nobody asked me if I wanted the job, now, did they?
You could have turned it down, the avatar of her conscience shot back.
And been sent back to that serpent’s nest of a planet to rot and die? To what end?
Her inner self fell silent.”
― Michael Reaves, Star Wars: Death Star

“The expansion of the state thus had the effect of gradually diminishing tribal and local boundaries within the same ethnos, and of reducing the differences between separate -ethnies- in multi-ethnic states and empires, subsuming them within supra-ethnic identities, even to the point of creating new, transformed, and larger ethnic identities.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“I was wrong. She is not a pawn. She is a Queen in this game. And that’s why the King is still safe.”
― Dharini Patel

“Religion, time and time again, brings down empires, rotting them from within.”
― Brian Herbert, The Machine Crusade

“Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”
― Zbigniew Brzeziński

“Some say," Scytale said, "that people cling to Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place. They can turn toward him and say: 'See, there He is. He makes us one.' Perhaps religion serves the same purpose, m'Lord.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“The empires of steel are gone, replaced by empires of silicone.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights

“History is a casualty of empire.”
― Christopher Kelly, The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction

“The best and most regal course is to abdicate. The supreme empire belongs to the emperor who abdicates from all normal life and from other men, for the preservation of his supremacy won't weigh on him like a load of jewels.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“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

“…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

“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

“Victory is but the vanguard of decay and decline.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies

“Empire creates its own Nemesis. The more you swing your dick globally- deposing here, bombing there- the more insecure & fragile you become. By trying to achieve that ever-elusive "full-spectrum dominance", you're only driving yourself further into bankruptcy & imperil ennui. That, my friends, is the inescapable paradox of empire...”
― The Futurist Devil