If, during the Second World War, the United States had retooled its factories for manufacturing bicycles instead of munitions, we’d be one of the healthiest, least oil-dependent, and most environmentally-sound constituents in the Nazi empire today.
I am not carrying on a war of extermination against the Romans. I am contending for honor and empire. My ancestors yielded to Roman valour. I am endeavouring that others, in their turn, will be obliged to yield to my good fortune, and my valour.
The Mirror Empire is the most original fantasy I've read in a long time, set in a world full of new ideas, expanding the horizons of the genre. A complex and intricate book full of elegant ideas and finely-drawn characters.
Every empire has to get sucked down the drain. As a British person, I know how it feels.
The Republicans do not look on the Democrats as the evil empire.
A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.
When we look at these types of things it echoes to lessons we haven't learned from the past. We still don't see Rome as a negative thing; we glorify the Roman Empire. It was a fascist state under the control of an incredibly authoritarian militant pre-emptive striking genocidal regime.
People of the United States have to really consider whether they want to be an empire. Sweden is not worried about terrorism. New Zealand is not worried about terrorism. Holland is not worried about terrorism. Why not be a modest little country without all of these enormous ambitions?
But a multitude of people, even the two hundred million of the Chinese empire, cannot subsist without civil government.
We must now face the difficult task of moving towards a single economy, a single political entity. . For the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire we have the opportunity to unite Europe.
The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.
I'm still a member of the Empire! Although I sometimes feel like an American with a British accent - you get contaminated after so long.
The sun never sets on the British Empire. But it rises every morning. The sky must get awfully crowded.
I have often before now been convinced that a democracy is incapable of empire.
Terrorism is the price of empire. If you do not wish to pay the price, you must give up the empire.
It has ever been my hobby-horse to see rising in America an empire of liberty, and a prospect of two or three hundred millions of freemen, without one noble or one king among them. You say it is impossible. If I should agree with you in this, I would still say, let us try the experiment, and preserve our equality as long as we can. A better system of education for the common people might preserve them long from such artificial inequalities as are prejudicial to society, by confounding the natural distinctions of right and wrong, virtue and vice.
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors. . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
History is made of empires, and the United States was by far and away the greatest, richest, and fairest empire that had every dominated the earth. Inevitably, it would fall. Empires always did. But we were lucky, you said. We got to participate in the most fascinating social experiment ever attempted.
The arrogance and brutality of empire are not repealed when they temporarily get deployed in a just cause.
People my age and younger do think much more towards Europe. We have to fill the gap sometime - we can't think we are an empire any longer after all.