154 Quotes About Empires

All interstellar empires rose and fell, ultimately, on their ability to deliver on this one simple, unexciting thing: logistics.

Assyria soon discovered a painful truth: empires are like Ponzi schemes: financial frauds in which previous investors are paid returns out of new investors' deposits. The costs of holding imperial territory can only be underwritten by loot and tribute extracted by constant new conquests; empires must continue to expand if they are not to collapse.

Empires aren't built in a day. But in the case of Erebus they can disappear in one.

Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.

Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.

Time shakes the stable tyranny of thrones, And tottering empires rush by their own weight.

There is great fear expressed on all sides lest this war shall be made a war for the negro. I am willing that it shall be. It is awar to found an empire on the negro in slavery, and shame on us if we do not make it a war to establish the negro in freedom--against whom the whole nation, North and South, East and West, in one mighty conspiracy, has combined from the beginning.

All through the years of the Soviet empire, its Politburo held 'elections.' Of course, calling something an election and actually having it be an election are different things.

Neither love nor ambition, as it has often been shown, can brook a division of its empire in the heart.