Aztec Empire Quotes

Mexico was conquered more by manipulation of myth and archetype.

That was when the Spanish came in and conquered the Aztecs. I thought that was a clever thing.

Tijuana is a baby compared to pre-Hispanic cities like Puebla or Oaxaca, the birthplace of mole.

The Zocalo is a magnificent space, at least four times the size of Trafalagar Square, with the National Palace on one side, the huge cathedral on the other, and in one corner part of the old Aztec City so brutally destroyed by Hernan Cortez and the Conquistadores.

When I was living in Mexico and writing a book called 'Aztec,' I had to make a deliberate effort to ignore a lot of the 'typically Mexican landscape' around me - banana and citrus groves, roses and carnations, burros and toros - because they did not exist in Mexico in the 15th century, the time of my book.

In high school, I loved history. I also loved cosmography, algebra. Mexico is so rich in culture and history, and I have always enjoyed that.

The Aztecs conducted sacrifices as a matter of course and often accumulated the skulls of their victims on racks outside their cities. One Conquistador wrote of a rack outside of Tenochtitlan with about 136,000 skulls.

In Mexico, I want to be known as the Aztec Warrior.

I learned to interpret the ancient pictograph codices and read Nahuatl, the Aztec language.

Taking it as a whole, Mexico is a grand city, and, as Cortes truly said, its situation is marvellous.

The Seven Cities of Gold always fascinated me. Southwestern U.S. history especially fascinates me. The whole spur of the Spanish exploration of the Southwestern U.S. was the search for these mythical Seven Cities of Gold.

It's a great historical joke that when the Spanish met the Aztecs, it was a blind date made in serve-you-right heaven. At the time, they were the two most unpleasant cultures in the entire world, and richly deserved each other. Still, the story of how stout Cortes blustered, bullied and bludgeoned his way to collapsing an entire empire with a handful of contagious hoodlums is astonishing.