Empires Rise And Fall Quotes

The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity—a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.

Can you see air you breathe? Can you see the force that moves the tides or changes the seasons or sends the birds to a winter haven?" Her eyes welled. "Can Rome with all its knowledge be so foolish? Oh Marcus, you can't carve God in stone. You can't limit him to a temple. You can't imprison him on a mountaintop. Heaven is his throne; earth, his footstool. Everything you see is his. Empires will rise and empires will fall. Only God prevails.

Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!

Moons might rise and fall, empires wax and wane, even the stars come and go, but there are constants too, and though the story of our kind is ever-changing it is also always the same.

Empires have collapsed throughout history. They rise, they build, and they fall. Nothing lasts forever. Not even our pain.

Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion.

Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon.

When avarice takes the lead in a state, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall.

It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to.

Another damn'd thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon? (On publication of Vol. 1 of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.

All empires fall, eventually.” “But why? It’s not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those who have known nothing else. Who have no comprehension of the need to rise above base desires.[”]

we all make vows, Jimmy. And there is something very beautiful and touching and noble about wanting good impulses to be permanent and true forever," she said. "Most of us stand up and vow to love, honor and cherish someone. And we truly mean it, at the time. But two or twelve or twenty years down the road, the lawyers are negotiating the property settlement." "You and George didn't go back on your promises." She laughed. "Lemme tell ya something, sweetface. I have been married at least four times, to four different men." She watched him chew that over for a moment before continuing, "They've all been named George Edwards but, believe me, the man who is waiting for me down the hall is a whole lot different animal from the boy I married, back before there was dirt. Oh, there are continuities. He has always been fun and he has never been able to budget his time properly and - well, the rest is none of your business." "But people change," he said quietly. "Precisely. People change. Cultures change. Empires rise and fall. Shit. Geology changes! Every ten years or so, George and I have faced the fact that we have changed and we've had to decide if it makes sense to create a new marriage between these two new people." She flopped back against her chair. "Which is why vows are such a tricky business. Because nothing stays the same forever. Okay. Okay! I'm figuring something out now." She sat up straight, eyes focused somewhere outside the room, and Jimmy realized that even Anne didn't have all the answers and that was either the most comforting thing he'd learned in a long time or the most discouraging. "Maybe because so few of us would be able to give up something so fundamental for something so abstract, we protect ourselves from the nobility of a priest's vows by jeering at him when he can't live up to them, always and forever." She shivered and slumped suddenly, "But, Jimmy! What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren't human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.

Everything that rises will fall. Empires, societies, governments. None of them lasts forever. Why? Because even though they are the products of change, they become resistant to change. The longer a society survives, the more it clings to its power, and the more it resists progress. The more it resists progress- resists change- the more its ciizens demand it. In response, the society tighten its grip, desperate to maintain control. It's afraid of losing its hold.

But not she. Her eternity is an article of her faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, woman, is perpetual, essential; she will go on for ever.

Up the hill, sheep bleat, oblivious to human empires rising and falling.

Kvothe continued, smiling himself “I see you laugh. Very well, for simplicity’s sake, let us assume I am the center of creation. In doing this, let us pass over innumerable boring stories: the rise and fall of empires, sagas of heroism, ballads of tragic love. Let us hurry forward to the only tale of any real importance.” His smile broadened. “Mine.

This is the most direct route from the mouth into the mantle, where the stomach and other organs lie, but as you might imagine, swallowing through your brain can be risky.

Society has three stages: Savagery, Ascendance, Decadence. The great rise because of Savagery. They rule in Ascendance. They fall because of their own Decadence." He tells how the Persians were felled, how the Romans collapsed because their rulers forgot how their parents gained them an empire. He prattles about Muslim dynasties and European effeminacy and Chinese regionalism and American self-loathing and self-neutering. All the ancient names. "Our Savagery began when our capital, Luna, rebelled against the tyranny of Earth and freed herself from the shackles of Demokracy, from the Noble Lie - the idea that men are brothers and are created equal." Augustus weaves lies of his own with that golden tongue of his. He tells of the Goldens' suffering. The Masses sat on the wagon and expected the great to pull, he reminds. They sat whipping the great until we could no longer take it. I remember a different whipping. "Men are not created equal; we all know this. There are averages. There are outliers. There are the ugly. There are the beautiful. This would not be if we were all equal. A Red can no more command a starship than a Green can serve as a doctor!" There's more laughter across the square as he tells us to look at pathetic Athens, the birthplace of the cancer they call Demokracy. Look how it fell to Sparta. The Noble Lie made Athens weak. It made their citizens turn on their best general, Alcibiades, because of jealousy. "Even the nations of Earth grew jealous of one another. The United States of America exacted this idea of equality through force. And when the nations united, the Americans were surprised to find that they were disliked! The Masses are jealous! How wonderful a dream it would be if all men were created equal! But we are not. It is against the Noble Lie that we fight. But as I said before, as I say to you now, there is another evil against which we war. It is a more pernicious evil. It is a subversive, slow evil. It is not a wildfire. It is a cancer. And that cancer is Decadence. Our society has passed from Savagery to Ascendance. But like our spiritual ancestors, the Romans, we too can fall into Decadence.

In an information industry the cost of monopoly must not be measured in dollars alone, but also in its effect on the economy of ideas and images, the restraint of which can ultimately amount to censorship.

and if any conclusion was reached, it was that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.

It is easier to start a war than end one.

Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.

Empire as located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe.

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a single nation); third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state. It all sounds so familiar. We have come a long road since our first chapter, and we are back in Rome.

He knew Mehmed would build something truly amazing. He knew that Constantinople needed to fall for Mehmed to hold on to his empire. He knew that Mehmed was the greatest sultan his people had ever known. But, like his love for Mehmed, it was no longer simple. Radu had seen what it took to be great, and he never again wanted to be part of something bigger than himself.

All my life," he said, "I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region—not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind—where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance

Augustine recast how people should view history, that history was not the story of the rise and fall of empires because those are human things. Those are the city of man. Rather, true history should be the history of salvation, of man moving toward God. It's a focus that takes the light off of this world and shines it much more brightly on the next world.

If you study a historical episode and feel good about it, it probably means that you haven't had it explained very well. Historical conflict is usually the struggle of different conceptions of what is good.

Very well, for simplicity’s sake, let us assume I am the center of creation. In doing this, let us pass over innumerable boring stories: the rise and fall of empires, sagas of heroism, ballads of tragic love. Let us hurry forward to the only tale of any real importance.” His smile broadened. “Mine.

With a cry of alarm, he bolted to the bathroom and made it with not a second to spare. He seemed to be on the throne long enough to have witnessed the rise and fall of an empire.

The economist John Maynard Keynes once said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

Winners and losers have the same goals,” he writes. “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

We look back on history, and what do we see? Empires rising and falling; revolutions and counter-revolutions succeeding one another; wealth accumulating and wealth dispersed; one nation dominant and then another. As Shakespeare’s King Lear puts it, “the rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.” In one lifetime I’ve seen my fellow countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, and the great majority of them convinced – in the words of what is still a favorite song – that God has made them mighty and will make them mightier yet. I’ve heard a crazed Austrian announce the establishment of a German Reich that was to last for a thousand years; an Italian clown report that the calendar will begin again with his assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Ashoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius. I’ve seen America wealthier than all the rest of the world put together; and with the superiority of weaponry that would have enabled Americans, had they so wished, to outdo an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of conquest. All in one little lifetime – gone with the wind: England now part of an island off the coast of Europe, threatened with further dismemberment; Hitler and Mussolini seen as buffoons; Stalin a sinister name in the regime he helped to found and dominated totally for three decades; Americans haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluid that keeps their motorways roaring and the smog settling, by memories of a disastrous military campaign in Vietnam, and the windmills of Watergate. Can this really be what life is about – this worldwide soap opera going on from century to century, from era to era, as old discarded sets and props litter the earth? Surely not. Was it to provide a location for so repetitive and ribald a production as this that the universe was created and man, or homo sapiens as he likes to call himself – heaven knows why – came into existence? I can’t believe it. If this were all, then the cynics, the hedonists, and the suicides are right: the most we can hope for from life is amusement, gratification of our senses, and death. But it is not all.

Dead shall rise, an' stars shall fall; Weald shall rot to ruin ae all. Lions roar an' angels weep; Sinners' hands our secrets keep. Til Godling's heart brights heav'en's eye, From reddest blood comes bluest sky.

The coming decades are likely to challenge much of what we think we know about what progress is, and about who we are in relation to the rest of nature. Can you think, or act, like the librarian of a monastery through the Dark Ages, guarding the old books as empires rise and fall outside?

Pain, fear, drudgery, boredom, lots of boredom—these are the things that build character. And you need to experience loss and remorse because falling down gives you the opportunity to rise once more. Overcoming challenges turns a self-centered infant into a caring adult. Empathy—the ability to understand and appreciate the feelings of others—is the cornerstone of civilization and the foundation of our relationships. Lack of it . . . well, lack of empathy is as close to a definition of evil that I can come up with.

When our government was in the process of being formed, Benjamin Franklin addressed the chairman of the Constitutional Convention, meeting at Philadelphia in 1787, saying, “I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, it is probable that an empire cannot rise without His aid.

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the suns themselves begin to die.

Long ago Napoleon had sounded the warning that China was but a sleeping giant: “Let him sleep! For when he wakes he will move the world.

Every age thinks it’s the modern age, but this one really is.

Moons might rise and fall, empires wax and wane, even the stars come and go, but there are constants too, and though the story of our kind is ever-changing it is also the same.

human nature that repeats itself, not history

before going into battle the men would drink water every morning until they vomited; taboos included never allowing a human shadow to fall across cooking food.

I wont leave anyone behind. We rise and fall together.

In his mind, he saw empires rise and fall like the swelling and abating of the tide, perpetual, each society blindly throwing it's tragedies and flaws onto foreign shores.

I, Pampa Kampana, am the author of this book. I have lived to see an empire rise and fall. How are they remembered now, these kings, these queens? They exist now only in words. While they lived, they were victors, or vanquished, or both. Now they are neither. Words are the only victors. What they did, or thought, or felt, no longer exists. Only these words describing those things remain. They will be remembered in the way I have chosen to remember them. Their deeds will only be known in the way they have been set down. They will mean what I wish them to mean. I myself am nothing now. All that remains is this city of words. Words are the only victors.

for simplicity’s sake, let us assume I am the center of creation. In doing this, let us pass over innumerable boring stories: the rise and fall of empires, sagas of heroism, ballads of tragic love. Let us hurry forward to the only tale of any real importance.” His smile broadened. “Mine.

Quahadis were the hardest, fiercest, least yielding component of a tribe that had long had the reputation as the most violent and warlike on the continent; if they ran low on water, they were known to drink the contents of a dead horse’s stomach, something even the toughest Texas Ranger would not do.

The last part anyone wanted, the last part civilized. The land alone stood a good chance of killing you. The fact that it was inhabited by Comanches and other mounted Indians made death something of a certainty.

The coin turns; where it falls, nobody knows. The coin turns, empires rise and empires fall, men live and men die, babies scream and dead men sigh; the world changes but people are always and are never the same.

All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,' the other man said to me during our initial meeting. 'Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by — whether it's religious scriptures or makeshift slogans — all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires — show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there —' he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, 'show business, show business, show business.' 'And what about dreams?' I asked, thinking I might have hit upon an exception to his dogmatic view, or at least one that he would accept as such. 'You mean the dreams of the sort we are having at this moment or the ones we have when we're fortunate enough to sleep?

As for the human case, the generation of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire—so significant to those involved—are not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope.

The collapse of order brings in its wake the four horsemen of the apocalypse - famine, war, pestilence, and death. Population declines, and wages increase, while rents decrease. As incomes of commoners recover, the fortunes of the upper classes hit the bottom. Economic distress of the elites and lack of effective government feed the continuing internecine wars. But civil wars thin the ranks of the elites. Some die in factional fighting, others succumb to feuds with neighbors, and many just give up on trying to maintain their noble status and quietly slip into the ranks of the commoners. Intra-elite competition subsides, allowing order to be restored. Stability and internal peace bring prosperity, and another secular cycle begins. 'So peace brings warre and warre brings peace.

Abandoned by the Spanish, thousands of mustangs ran wild into the open plains that resembled so closely their ancestral Iberian lands. Because they were so perfectly adapted to the new land, they thrived and multiplied. They became the foundation stock for the great wild mustang herds of the Southwest. This event has become known as the Great Horse Dispersal.

The window logs Kilburn’s skyline. Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never come here. Here bust is permanent. Empty State Empire, empty Odeon, graffiti-streaked sidings rising and falling like a rickety roller coaster. Higgledy-piggledy rooftops and chimneys, some high, some low, packed tightly, shaken fags in a box. Behind the opposite window, retreating Willesden. Number 37. In the 1880s or thereabouts the whole thing went up at once – houses, churches, schools, cemeteries – an optimistic vision of Metroland. Little terraces, faux-Tudor piles. All the mod cons! Indoor toilet, hot water. Well-appointed country living for those tired of the city. Fast-forward. Disappointed city living for those tired of their countries.

The first generations of Comanches in captivity never really understood the concept of wealth, of private property. The central truth of their lives was the past, the dimming memory of the wild, ecstatic freedom of the plains, of the days when Comanche warriors in black buffalo headdresses rode unchallenged from Kansas to northern Mexico, of a world without property or boundaries. What Quanah had that the rest of his tribe in the later years did not was that most American of human traits: boundless optimism.

The greatest threat of all to their identity, and to the very idea of a nomadic hunter in North America, appeared on the plains in the late 1860s. These were the buffalo men. Between 1868 and 1881 they would kill thirty-one million buffalo, stripping the plains almost entirely of the huge, lumbering creatures and destroying any last small hope that any horse tribe could ever be restored to its traditional life. There was no such thing as a horse Indian without a buffalo herd. Such an Indian had no identity at all.

Empires may rise and fall; liberty and slavery succeed alternately; ignorance and knowledge give place to each other; but the cherry-tree will still remain in the woods of Greece, Spain, and Italy, and will never be affected by the revolutions of human society.

I have done my utmost to let the events speak for themselves, and if any conclusion was reached, it was that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history. We often learn more about the past from the present, in fact, than the reverse.

This postponement of the attack on Russia in order that the Nazi warlord might vent his personal spite against a small Balkan country which had dared to defy him was probably the most catastrophic single decision in Hitler’s career. It is hardly too much to say that by making it that March afternoon in the Chancellery in Berlin during a moment of convulsive rage he tossed away his last golden opportunity to win the war and to make of the Third Reich, which he had created with such stunning if barbarous genius, the greatest empire in German history and himself the master of Europe.

Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon. In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.

Most history books focus on the ideas of great thinkers, the bravery of warriors, the charity of saints and the creativity of artists. They have much to tell about the weaving and unravelling of social structures, about the rise and fall of empires, about the discovery and spread of technologies. Yet they say nothing about how all this influenced the happiness and suffering of individuals. This is the biggest lacuna in our understanding of history. We had better start filling it.

Kusaka was shaken by the realization that the American was as determined as any samurai. He silently prayed for him.

The Japanese were again committed to a useless fight to the death.

Eating connects us to our histories as much as it connects our souls to our bodies, our bodies to the earth.

The aristocrats had to force them to do their jobs. After all, human beings are not badgers. We aren't molded to stoop.

Unlike almost every other commodity, information becomes more valuable the more it is used. Consider

If we believe in liberty, it must be freedom from both private and public coercion.

Author reports that a group of tortoises was given to the British by India's natives during the Seven Years War which ended in 1763. The last of those tortoises died in 2004 at the age of 255.

Adams and Jefferson lived in an age of quantification. It began with the measurement of time. Time used to be a wheel that turned, and turned again; during the scientific revolution, time became a line. Time, the easiest quantity to measure, became the engine of every empirical inquiry: an axis, an arrow. This new use and understanding of time contributed to the idea of progress—if time is a line instead of a circle, things can get better and even better, instead of forever rising and falling in endless cycles, like the seasons. The idea of progress animated American independence and animated, too, the advance of capitalism. The quantification of time led to the quantification of everything else: the counting of people, the measurement of their labor, and the calculation of profit as a function of time.

longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: “that God governs in the affairs of man.” And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?

I have sergested the propriaty of your coming to see me before I commence the construction of thes arms . . . Get from the department an order to cum to New York & direct in the construction of thees arms with the improvements you sergest.63 Thus

One thing was clear to the ministers and civil servants who framed these policies: Britain’s colonies and the new transatlantic commerce they were generating were a vital national asset to be coveted, protected and extended, if necessary by aggression.

History, as it was purveyed to us, was not so much a narrative, not even the detached observation of the rise and fall of fortunes and cultures. It was the litany of loss, attended by the inevitable sympathy for the vanquished side. The past was always the underdog, and we sensed it was only right to be on its side against the bully future. We were left with the impression that our own grip was loosening on some essential pediment as one empire after another was swallowed up, and the centuries collapsed into our own.

I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, it is probable that an empire cannot rise without His aid.

The main barrier between East and West today is that the white man is not willing to give up his superiority and the colored man is no longer willing to endure his inferiority.… The white man is a century behind the colored man. The white man is still thinking in terms of colonies and colonial government. The colored man knows that colonies and colonial-mindedness are anachronisms. The colonial way of life is over, whether the white man knows it or not, and all that remains is to kick off the shell of the chrysalis. The man of Asia today is not a colonial and he has made up his mind he will never be a colonial again.

The accelerating Japanese success was unforeseen on both sides. A captured British Engineer officer told Colonel Tsuji he had expected the defenses in northern Malaya to hold out for at least three months. “As the Japanese Army had not beaten the weak Chinese Army after four years’ fighting in China we did not consider it a very formidable enemy.

An axe rising into the air, the sun’s light scattering from its chipped edge. A whisper of air and a cry of effort as a shield met the blow and shattered. Splinters pinwheeling through the air and sudden lack of weight on his arm. Gladius stabbing forward, driven by training and instinct.A gap opening in the line ahead. A soldier falling and stumbling over the injured man, desperate to keep his shield high and sword in tight. Moving into the gap and slamming the shield forward to create room, peering over the top, wary of an attack. Heavy armour and biting pain at the base of your neck where the helmet’s rim met flesh. Sweat pouring down your face, under the cheek guards, and hot breath burning lungs as each precious gasp powered you forward.

This coup de main gave Morgan the means to make himself a Jamaican planter and to secure a knighthood, respectability and the governorship of the colony. It also, like Drake’s similar exploits a hundred years before, made a deep impression on the public imagination and reinforced that popular image of distant lands as places where quick fortunes were waiting for the energetic and ruthless.

In roughly that same time period, while General George Armstrong Custer achieved world fame in failure and catastrophe, Mackenzie would become obscure in victory. But it was Mackenzie, not Custer, who would teach the rest of the army how to fight Indians. As he moved his men across the broken, stream-crossed country, past immense herds of buffalo and prairie-dog towns that stretched to the horizon, Colonel Mackenzie did not have a clear idea of what he was doing, where precisely he was going, or how to fight Plains Indians in their homelands. Neither did he have the faintest idea that he would be the one largely responsible for defeating the last of the hostile Indians. He was new to this sort of Indian fighting, and would make many mistakes in the coming weeks. He would learn from them. For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retribution. He had been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Great Plains fastness because, six years after the end of the Civil War, the western frontier was an open and bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a place where anarchy and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war, unchallenged by foreign foes in North America for the first time in its history, the Union now found itself unable to deal with the handful of remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to retreat meekly onto reservations where they quickly learned the meaning of abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Great Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now by a mixture of vengeance and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.

10 fundamental lessons of history: 1. We do not learn from history. 2. Science and technology do not make us immune to the laws of history. 3. Freedom is not a universal value. 4. Power is the universal value. 5. The Middle East is the crucible of conflict and the graveyard of empires. 6. The United States shares the destinies of the great democracies, the republics, and the superpowers of the past. 7. Along with the lust for power, religion and spirituality are the most profound motivators in human history. 8. Great nations rise and fall because of human decisions made by individual leaders. 9. The statesman is distinguished from a mere politician by four qualities: a bedrock of principles, a moral compass, a vision, and the ability to create a consensus to achieve that vision. 10. Throughout its history, the United States has charted a unique role in history.

As earnings from abroad fell, wealthy Dutch savers moved their cash into British investments, which were more attractive due to their strong growth and higher yields.9 Despite this, the guilder remained widely used as a global reserve currency. As explained earlier, reserve currency status classically lags the decline of other key drivers of the rise and fall of empires. Then, as is typical, a rising great power challenged the existing great power in a war.

Benjamin Franklin acknowledged while helping create the Constitution of the United States: [T]he longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: that God* governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, sir, in the Sacred Writings that “except the Lord build they labor in vain that build it” [quoting the Bible from Psalm 127:1].

The First Reich had been the medieval Holy Roman Empire; the Second Reich had been that which was formed by Bismarck in 1871 after Prussia’s defeat of France. Both had added glory to the German name. The Weimar Republic, as Nazi propaganda had it, had dragged that fair name in the mud. The Third Reich restored it, just as Hitler had promised. Hitler’s Germany, then, was depicted as a logical development from all that had gone before—or at least of all that had been glorious.

How could a nation rich in resources and land, and free from fear of attack, understand the position of a tiny, crowded island empire with almost no natural resources, which was constantly in danger of attack from a ruthless neighbor, the Soviet Union? America herself had, moreover, contributed to the atmosphere of hate and distrust by excluding the Japanese from immigration and, in effect, flaunting a racial and color prejudice that justifiably infuriated the proud Nipponese.

None of them understand... they can't see the enormity of time the way I can, the way it swallows all our striving... they want to live solely in the moment, not realizing that for our kind the moment never ends. Empires have come and gone, continents have been discovered and populated from shore to shore, men have walked on the moon, wars have consumed the planet... everything dies, but we remain. We are witnesses to the endless decay of the world. No matter how high we rise, eventually... ashes to ashes, we all fall down.

The world is completely out of control. Life comes, life goes. Empires rise, empires fall. And it’s just a matter of time that planet earth vanishes because the Sun swallows it. The house we live in, the money we have in the bank, the people we love, they’re all going down the drain someday. From this perspective, we may see that it’s kind of crazy to spend our lives attaching ourselves (sometimes painfully) to the world around us. The world changes all the time. The things we attach ourselves to never last. This is yet another reason why it’s better to let go of them.

Past successes may be inspirational and encouraging, but they are not by themselves reliable indicators of or guides to future success. The most efficacious changes in any system are informed not by successes but by failures. The surest way for the designer of any system to achieve success is to recognize and correct the flaws of predecessor systems, whether they be in building codes or in banking policies or in bridges.25 The history of civilization itself has been one of rises and falls, of successes and failures. Some of these have been of empires, dynasties, families; others have been of nations, states, and cities. Common to all of them has been the human element, embodied in the ruler and the ruled alike. Given that the ultimate unit of civilization is the individual, we need look no further than within ourselves to gain insight into the world and its ways, including the failure of its institutions and its systems. And, just as those institutions and systems are made up of individual people and things, so ultimately must we look to ourselves and to how we interact with the world, both given and made, whenever something goes wrong.

All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a SUPERINTENDING Providence in our favor. To that kind Providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need his assistance? I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?

Humans like to consider everything as linear, when in reality everything is cyclic. They are obsessed with straight lines. Straight roads, straight houses, straight pieces of steel, glass, and timber. Straight cut diamonds. Let’s get straight to the point. Be straight with me. I am straight, not gay. And this is how they see their lives. A linear journey, along the road of life. That is where expressions such as Highway to Hell come from. But what about other expressions, such as the life cycle, the cycle of nature, and the weather cycle? Because of this obsession with straight lines, they view history and historical events, as existing way back along an imaginary path, one they are sure they are far away from. Like watching a fading wake from a ship. So when they look at the religious wars, for example, the Christians versus the Muslims, the rise and fall of Empires, democracies and dictatorships, they seem blind when comparing present day situations with those of the past. The majority of humans see evolution as a race along a straight race track, a race they are winning by a long margin, yet they are afraid to ever slow down, in case other life catches them. If they did slow down long enough, they may observe that the track is actually cyclic.

the State “has the supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State… for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges…” And the happiness of the individual on earth? Hegel replies that “world history is no empire of happiness. The periods of happiness,” he declares, “are the empty pages of history because they are the periods of agreement, without conflict.” War is the great purifier. In Hegel’s view, it makes for “the ethical health of peoples corrupted by a long peace, as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm.

Calf-deep in the soothing water I indulge myself in the wishful vision. I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the capital, of groping my way out to the ruins in the desert, of returning to the confinement of my cell, of seeking out the barbarians and offering myself to them to use as they wish. Without exception they are dreams of ends: dreams not of how to live but of how to die. And everyone, I know, in that walled town sinking now into darkness (I hear the two thin trumpet calls that announce the closing of the gates) is similarly preoccupied. What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in the water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one: I, wading in the ooze, am no less infected with it than the faithful Colonel Joll as he tracks the enemies of Empire through the boundless desert, sword unsheathed to cut down barbarian after barbarian until at last he finds and slays the one whose destiny it should be (or if not his then his son's or unborn grandson's) to climb the bronze gateway to the Summer Palace and topple the globe surmounted by the tiger rampant that symbolizes eternal domination, while his comrades below cheer and fire their muskets in the air.

Lieutenant Moore and his two companions were trying to give chase. They found to their amazement that the Zeros were faster and more maneuverable, climbing at an astounding rate. They had been assured there was no such thing as a good Japanese fighter plane, although exact data on these Zeros had been sent to the War Department by the brilliant and unorthodox Colonel Claire Chennault in the fall of 1940. The chief of the Flying Tigers had also elaborated in detail on ways whereby the heavier P-40 should be able to shoot down the faster Zero, but this information, which could have saved the lives of bewildered American pilots dying that moment, had been filed away. Chennault was too much of a maverick to be taken seriously by his superiors.

The empire cannot become a child again. Nobody can. It cannot simply give away its cannons, machines, and money and once again write poems in small peaceful cities and play sonatas. But it can take the path that the individual must also take when his life has led him to make mistakes and suffer profound torment. It can recall its previous past, its heritage and childhood, its maturation, its rise and fall, and it can find the power while recalling everything that essentially and immortally belongs to it. It must “go into itself,” as devout people say. And in itself, it will find its essence undestroyed, and this essence will not want to avoid its destiny but affirm it and begin anew out of its best and most profound qualities that have been rediscovered.

(which was a mistake, for the value of an aristocratic title, like that of a share quoted on the stock exchange, rises when in demand and falls when on offer. Everything we believe imperishable tends toward destruction; a social position, like everything else, is not given once and for all but, just like the power of an empire, is reconstituted from moment to moment through a sort of endless renewed process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies of social or political history over half a century. The creation of the world did not happen “in the beginning,” it happens from day to day. The Marquise de Saint-Loup thought, “I am the Marquise de Saint-Loup,” in the knowledge that the night before she had turned down three invitations to dine with duchesses. But if to a certain extent her name enhanced the distinctly un-aristocratic circles which she entertained, by an inverse movement the circles which invited the Marquise devalued the name that she bore. Nothing resists such movements,

Church Fathers on the End Times The Church Fathers taught pre-millennialism in the first three centuries. Here are the pre-millennial teachings from the Fathers in their order:   1.        The Roman Empire would split in two. (This took place in AD 395.) 2.        The Roman Empire would fall apart. (This took place in AD 476.) 3.        Out of what was the Roman Empire, ten nations would spring up. These are the ten toes/horns of Daniel’s prophecies. 4.        A literal demon-possessed man, called the Antichrist, will ascend to power. 5.        The Antichrist’s name, if spelled out in Greek, will add up to 666. 6.        The Antichrist will sign a peace treaty between the Jews in Israel and the local non-believers there. This treaty will last seven years. 7.        This seven-year treaty is the last seven years of the “sets of sevens” prophecy in Daniel 9. 8.        At the end of the seven years, Jesus will return to earth, destroy the Antichrist, and establish reign of peace that will last for a literal 1000 years. 9.        They wrote they were taught these things by the apostles. They also wrote that anyone who rises up in the church and begins to say any of these things are symbolic, are immature Christians that can’t rightly divide the word of God, and should not be listened too. (Today these beliefs are included in the doctrines of most of, but not all of, the Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic churches!)   Here are some of the references from the early church fathers on the End Times:   “After the resurrection of the dead, Jesus will personally reign for 1000 years. He was taught this by the apostle John himself.” Papias Fragment 6   “The man of Sin, spoken of by Daniel, will rule two (three) times and a half, before the Second Advent… There will be a literal 1000 year reign of Christ… The man of apostasy, who speaks strange things against the Most High, shall venture to do unlawful deeds on the earth against us, the believers.” Justin Martyr Dialogue 32,81,110

Aelin lifted onto her toes. She felt Rowan’s eyes on her the whole time, felt his body go still with predatory focus, as she kissed the corner of his mouth, the bow of his lips, the other corner. Soft, taunting kisses. Designed to see which one of them yielded first. Rowan did. With a sharp intake of breath, he gripped her hips, tugging her against him as he slanted his mouth over hers, deepening the kiss until her knees threatened to buckle. His tongue brushed hers—lazy, deft strokes that told her precisely what he was capable of doing elsewhere. Embers sparked in her blood, and the moss beneath them hissed as rain turned to steam. Aelin broke the kiss, breathing ragged, satisfied to find Rowan’s own chest rising and falling in an uneven rhythm. So new—this thing between them was still so new, so … raw. Utterly consuming. The desire was only the start of it. Rowan made her magic sing. And maybe that was the carranam bond between them, but … her magic wanted to dance with his. And from the frost sparkling in his eyes, she knew his own demanded the same.

Plato launched an empirical psychology, the first of its kind in the West. Others, prior to Plato, tended to make proposals about what sort of matter the soul is made of—air, earth, fire, or water. No one had proposed a theory about how the different parts of a human personality work together to produce human behavior. This sort of thing is what today is called a faculty psychology. It is called this because it posits separate mechanisms—or faculties—in the mind (or body) whose function it is to control different aspects of human mentality. Faculty psychologies are contrasted with functional psychologies, which explain different aspects of human mentality not by assigning them to different mechanisms in the mind or brain but rather to different ways in which a single organ of mentality functions. Aristotle, and then various thirteenth- and fourteenth-century thinkers, wavered between these two views. Recently, with the advent in cognitive psychology of modular theories of human mentality, a modern descendant of Plato’s faculty psychology has come back into fashion.

You can't believe in the Great A'Tuin," he said. "Great A'Tuin exists. There's no point in believing in things that exist." "Someone's put up their hand," said Urn. "Yes?" "Sir, surely only things that exist are worth believing in?" said the enquirer, who was wearing a uniform of a sergeant of the Holy Guard. "If they exist, you don't have to believe in them," said Didactylos. "They just are." He sighed. "What can I tell you? What do you want to hear? I just wrote down what people know. Mountains rise and fall, and under them the Turtle swims onward. Men live and die, and the Turtle Moves. Empires grow and crumble, and the Turtle Moves. Gods come and go, and still the Turtle Moves. The Turtle Moves." From the darkness came a voice, "And that is really true?" Didactylos shrugged. "The Turtle exists. The world is a flat disc. The sun turns round it once every day, dragging its light behind it. And this will go on happening, whether you believe it is true or not. It is real. I don't know about truth. Truth is a lot more complicated than that. I don't think the Turtle gives a bugger whether it's true or not, to tell you the truth.