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

“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

“There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.”
― Kevin J. Anderson

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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“... 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

“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

“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

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

“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

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

“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: A Space Opera Adventure

“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, The Lost City of Z

“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

“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