#empire

All empires become arrogant. It is their nature. ↗

— Edward Rutherfurd

#politics-observation #nature

I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks ↗

— Charles Darwin

#ottoman-empire #turkey #nature

For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power. ↗

— Thomas Hobbes

#belief #catholic-church #fairies #heathen #materialism

Outside the walls, among others, is the Soviet Empire. It is malevolent, destructive and expanding. It has swallowed up over half a dozen countries since World War II. ↗

— Barbara Amiel

#countries #destructive #dozen #empire #expanding

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too. ↗

— Marcus Aurelius

#changing #empires #fell #foresee #future

On the eve of World War I, an estimated two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. Well over a million were deported and hundreds of thousands were simply killed. ↗

— Eliot Engel

#deported #empire #estimated #eve #hundreds

All comparisons between America's current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the Roman Empire. ↗

— Donald Kagan

#america #any #anything #between #called