Voltaire Quotes

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

The sun never sets on the immense empire of Charles V.

If you look at the history of the U.S., we were an empire long before we were a nation.

America has never been an empire. … We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused.

Bosnia and Herzegovina. Austria-Hungary reserves the right to annex these provinces at whatever moment she shall deem opportune.

The pioneer army perpetually... strikes to the front. Empire plants itself upon the trails.

With nearly every great European empire today walks its dark colonial shadow …

Charlemagne either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.

The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, the United Nations is a disunited collection of regimes, many of which do not represent the nations they govern.

Nations … robbed each other in English, and fooled each other in French

God caused the sun of Empire to shine in the mansion of the Turks … and gave them sovereignty, and made them kings of the age, and placed the reins of the people of the time in their hands.

Christopher Columbus was the spearhead of the biggest invasion and genocide ever seen in the history of humanity

If ... America is to become an empire, there is very little chance that it can avoid becoming a virtual dictatorship as well.

If we approach the war on terrorism with the fervor of a Christian jihad against Islam, our battle is already lost, for we have become what we opposed and we are now the fundamentalists…. My comfort and liberty must not be won by the sacrifices of a new and foreign poor now paying the price for our moral failings of diplomacy. economy and statesmanship, turning our Republic into an Empire.

Existing colonial empires rest upon insecure foundations. There seems, indeed, something unnatural in the spectacle of seven million Dutch ruling over fifty million Malays.

...if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British empire would not have been made.

People are not likely to lie on the Internet about the atomic number of Rubidium, but they will lie about history.

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false pretenses, they call empire and where they make a desert they call it peace.

Most civilizational advancements occurred under empires.

As an Englishman, particularly as an Englishman standing upon foreign soil, I am, of course, prepared to argue that every war we have ever fought was a purely defensive war. But I am obliged to take cognizance of the quite simple historical fact that for about one thousand years, since the time indeed when Norwegians ravaged our coasts and a certain Scandinavian landed at Hastings in 1066, every war we have fought happens to have been fought in other people's countries. Now if defense means merely keeping burglars out of the house, what were we doing on all those occasions in other people's houses?

The United States although a superpower was never an empire..

Long did I endeavor … to preserve from breaking that fine and noble vase, the British Empire; for I knew that, being once broken, the separate parts could not retain even their share of the strength or value that existed in the whole.

in their ideal forms nation and empire stand at opposite ends of a political spectrum, but in the actuality of history they influenced, reinforced, and undermined one another at different times and in different ways.

I'm from England, and like every other great empire who stole bits of the world, there is a price to pay. And I was born in 1935. So, since I've been conscious of the world, I've either been in, or been on the periphery of, a war zone.

I do not know if the doctrine that the nation-state arose in the 19th century was still being taught:;... but it is erroneous. The nation-state reaches back far into the origins of Europe itself and perhaps beyond. If Europe was not always a Europe of nations, it was always a Europe in which nations existed, and were taken for granted, as a basic form of the State.