Benjamin Franklin Quotes

Look at the history of empires. They come and they go. They ebb and they flow.

These different blocs in the Turkish Empire...always conspired against Turkey; because of the hostility of these native peoples, Turkey has lost province after province - Greece, Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Egypt, and Tripoli. In this way, the Turkish Empire has dwindled almost to nothing.

This [American] empire will not last. No empire does. If empires lasted, the whole world would be speaking ancient Persian today.

The main motivation was to explore the empire's falling. I mean 'Duck City' is like an allegory for the Western Empire or the United States. And I was thinking what happens when it falls and declines like the Roman Empire.

Empires implode from within due to their own excesses.

If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption, or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they espouse.

From the material point of view the proposal is unacceptable, for France, without further territory in Europe being taken from her, could be so crushed as to lose her position as a Great Power, and become subordinate to German policy.

The increase of territory and power of empires by force of arms has been the policy of all great powers, and it has always been possible to get the approval of their state religion.

When I was young and the empire was beginning to disintegrate, the idea was absolutely unbelievable, particularly to children who'd been taught that the sun never set... that's what all my books are about, the end of empire.

During the 19th century, Iranians lost vast territories in disastrous wars, and corrupt monarchs sold everything of value in the country to foreigners.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.

The great empire will be torn from limb, the all-powerful one for more than four-hundred years: Great power given to the dark one from slaves come.

We really need to stop the imperialist tendencies of countries like the United States and Great Britain.

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.

Ch'in Shih-huang is the first emperor of China. He united seven separate kingdoms into a single nation. He built the Great Wall and was buried with the terra-cotta soldiers. The Chinese have mixed feelings about him. They're proud of the nation he created, but he was a maniacal tyrant.

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.

Empires inevitably fall, and when they do, history judges them for the legacies they leave behind.

Fundamental systemic crises are often associated with the decline of the dominant imperial power and its increasing inability to sustain the system over which it had previously presided. The profound instability of the interwar period owed much to Britain's inability to maintain its role.

I feel most empires fell when they started to act human, but then look at Russia. They kept a pretty strong hand, and they fell from Afghanistan alone because Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. I guess you just can't sustain it.

The American Republic was bound - is still bound - to follow in the centuries to come the same course to destruction as did Rome.

The war is going to end because we're gonna have such a political and financial havoc here with the devaluation of our dollar, because we just can't keep affording it. This is usually how empires end, by spending too much money maintaining their empire. We're in 130 countries, we have 700 bases around the world, and it's going to come to an end. I want it to come to an end more gracefully and peacefully, follow the constitution, and follow a more sensible foreign policy.

As we all know from the Roman empire, big empires go down if the borders are not well-protected.

All great empires die from within.