Imperial Collapse Quotes

Empires implode from within due to their own excesses.

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

The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan.

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

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.

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.

Suddenly in a matter of months there were more than 100 thousand Boxers in the capital, from ordinary people to soldiers to princes and grandees … The capital would be plunged into unthinkable peril if I tried to use the army to crush them. I have to go along with them and salvage the situation somehow...

Two formidable historic powers --the temporal dominion of the Popes and the Austro-Hungarian Empire--have stood in her path and attempted to bar her way. Italy has overthrown them one after the other. If any other power should insist upon barring her way today, Italy will sooner or later know how to force it aside also.

Being a unique superpower undermines the military intelligence of strategy. To think strategically, one has to imagine oneself in the enemy's place. If one cannot do this, it is impossible to foresee, to take by surprise, to outflank. Misinterpreting an enemy can lead to defeat. This is how empires fall.

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.

The reason is that a military defeat of Britain will bring about the disintegration of the British Empire. This would not be of any benefit to Germany.

America is the new Roman Empire. Remember what happened to Rome.

All great empires die from within.

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

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.

All empires become arrogant. It is their nature.

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.

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

The Turkish Empire has just committed suicide.

It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind.

Look to the past and remember no empire rises that sooner or later won't fall.

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.

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.

The Second World War had a precipitating effect in that it discredited the empires, as well as bankrupting them. Not only could you no longer, if you were a colonial subject of France in Africa, look to France as a model of power and influence and civility after what had happened in the war. Nor could the French any longer afford to run their empire. And nor could the British, although they were not discredited in the way that the French were.

The Romanovs are overtaken by the Indian Maharajahs as American heiresses pick over the carcasses of fallen Empire.