Empire Decline Quotes

Nations and empires flourish and decay, By turns command, and in their turns obey.

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

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

At the end of the Roman Empire, in the Byzantine period, the empire shrinks and shrinks until it consists of one city, Constantinople, and the Ottoman Turks can encircle it.

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.

You know, 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.

Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts, or to empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.

Empires can only decline when other nations decline and make way for them.

All great empires die from within.

Empires are doomed. They become more diffuse, more broke, demagogues rule, and so I was just pointing out some similarities between past empires and what's going on right now. They all have had to apply more and more harsh rhetoric of superiority and divine right to justify the building of hegemony.

It's always been the case that you have the really rich, and the really poor. But hey, look, all the great empires have their periods where they rule the world, and then they crumble.

I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

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.

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

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

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.

So what if America loses its empire? We never should have had one in the first place.

I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.

The events of 11 September will be remembered as the end of the US empire. This is because all empires collapse when they pursue the arrogance of power.

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.

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

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place. Then, also, is produced the phenomenon of agglomeration, of "the full." For that reason, as Spengler has very well observed, it was necessary, just as in our day, to construct enormous buildings. The epoch of the masses is the epoch of the colossal.

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.

Behold a republic standing erect while empires all around are bowed beneath the weight of their own armaments - a republic whose flag is loved while other flags are only feared.

But the line of thought that I'd been chasing for several days was implicit in the ruins of the old Roman Empire, which gradually destroyed itself by substituting the faith in a legion of miraculous words for the strength of armies and the weight of walls.