Paul Verlaine Quotes

Every empire eventually falls.

If we don't stop behaving like the British Empire, we will end up like the British Empire.

America is an empire. I hope you know that now. All empires, by definition, are bumbling, shambolic, bullying, bureaucratic affairs, as certain of the rightness of their cause in infancy, as they are corrupted by power in their dotage.

Wealth conquered Rome after Rome had conquered the world.

The foundations of empire are often occasions of woe; their dismemberment, always.

I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which lead to a dark gulf.

I was up above it. Now, I'm down in it.

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.

Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

Every empire has to get sucked down the drain. As a British person, I know how it feels.

It is when empires begin to fall, that they tend to cause the most mayhem.

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Today's empire is tomorrow's ashes...

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

Boundless intemperance In nature is a tyranny. It hath been Th' untimely emptying of the happy throne And fall of many kings.

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.

And so long as they were at war, their power was preserved, but when they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing, and had never engaged in any employment higher than war.

Could the world fall?

Children of the future, watching empires fall. Madness the cup they drink from, self destruction the toll.

Those that have so much power over others as to be able to oppress them have seldom so much over themselves as not to oppress.

It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity

Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting