Peter the Great
Tsar
"I have conquered an empire but I have not been able to conquer myself"
Empires quotes
Empires
299 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Edward Said
Literary Theorist, Critic, and Author
"Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."
Winston Churchill
Politician, Writer, Historian
"The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen's lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire."
Arthur Conan Doyle
Writer, Physician
"London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained."
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Politician, Philosopher, Orator
"The home is the empire! There is no peace more delightful than one's own fireplace."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside empires — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Empires quotes (page 1 of 15)
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"No one is free who has not obtained the empire of himself."
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"This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."
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"loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away."
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"Man who man would be, must rule the empire of himself."
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"I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire."
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"Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee."
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"Down with the U.S. empire! It must be said, in the entire world: Down with the empire!"
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"My mind to me an empire is,While grace affordeth health."
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"Before the birth of Love, many fearful things took place through the empire of necessity; but when this god was born, all things rose to men."
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"Fate of empires depends on the education of youth"
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"To destroy Christianity, we must first destroy the British Empire."
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"All previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tatars remain in our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will therefore be proclaimed as fabrications."
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"Let's save the human race, let's finish off the U.S. empire."
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"I hereby accuse the North American empire of being the biggest menace to our planet."
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"We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies. (p. 5)"
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"An empire is an immense egotism."
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"Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual."
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"It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself."
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"When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish."
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"We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it."
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