Ralph Nader Quotes

All great nations inevitably end up committing suicide.

The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.

The thing that's really important to understand is, the last thing an empire traditionally does is drive itself into bankruptcy. You've seen that with the great empires.

All empires fall eventually. It is the way of things.

No empire intoxicated with the red wine of power and the plunder of weaker races has yet lived long in this world.

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

Every empire eventually falls.

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

All empires come to an end, and the American one is no exception.

To capture the human cost of fallen empire with all its horror and absurdity, Sheets offers the right combination: the political insight of a top reporter and the power of a novelist.

Can't' will be the epitaph of the British Empire - unless we wake up in time.

Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes.

That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended - civilizations are built up - excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top, and then it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down.

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.

Any unchecked impulse does, within the human body and psyche, lead to the destruction of the organism.

You told me you had destroyed it." "I was wrong. It has destroyed me.

Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.

Revenge is the raging fire that consumes the arsonist.

It seems that man's greatest natural enemy is the target.

The Roman Empire came to an end, but the Roman people didn't come to an end, so I see the American Empire coming to an end just as other empires have come to an end.

Destiny is another name for humanity's half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought.

You can't cage an eagle for long without destroying it.

Death! great proprietor of all! 'tis thine To tread out empire, and to quench the stars.

Often it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving those who destroy them.