“Empires of conquest don’t last, Administrator Perry. They hollow out from within, from the greed of rulers and the endless appetite for war.”

—  John Scalzi , The Last Colony

Source: The Last Colony (2007), Chapter 10 (p. 195)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Empires of conquest don’t last, Administrator Perry. They hollow out from within, from the greed of rulers and the endl…" by John Scalzi?
John Scalzi photo
John Scalzi 68
American science fiction writer 1969

Related quotes

Susan Sontag photo

“The Bush administration has committed the country to a new, pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war — for "the war on terror" is nothing less than that.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Regarding the Torture of Others (2004)

Lupe Fiasco photo

“The fear that rules us comes NOT from the outside but from within. Mastering self-control also means stripping the rulers of a prized weapon.”

Lupe Fiasco (1982) rapper

Rules 2 Rule

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery photo

“The last piece of advice I shall venture to offer the Liberal party is this, that they shall not dissociate themselves, even indirectly or unconsciously, or by any careless words, from the new sentiment of Empire which occupies the nation. To many the word "Empire" is suspect as indicating aggression and greed and violence and the characteristics of other empires that the world has known; but the sentiment that is represented now by Empire in these islands has nothing of that in it. (Cheers.) It is a passion of affection and family feeling, of pride and of hopefulness; and the statesman, however great he may be, who dissociates himself from that feeling must not be surprised if the nation dissociates itself from him.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Cheers
Speech at Chesterfield (16 December 1901), reported in The Times (17 December 1901), p. 10.

Emmanuel Levinas photo

“The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity.”

Emmanuel Levinas book Totality and Infinity

Context: The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed.

Totality and Infinity (1961)

Starhawk photo

“On some deep cosmic level, we are all one, and within us we each contain the potential for good and for destruction, for compassion and hate, for generosity and greed. But even if I acknowledge the full range of impulses within myself, that doesn't erase the differences between a person acting from compassion and love, and another choosing to act from hate and greed. Moreover, it doesn't erase my responsibility to challenge a system which furthers hate and greed.”

Starhawk (1951) American author, activist and Neopagan

Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)
Context: On some deep cosmic level, we are all one, and within us we each contain the potential for good and for destruction, for compassion and hate, for generosity and greed. But even if I acknowledge the full range of impulses within myself, that doesn't erase the differences between a person acting from compassion and love, and another choosing to act from hate and greed. Moreover, it doesn't erase my responsibility to challenge a system which furthers hate and greed. If I don't resist such a system, I am complicit in what it does. I join the perpetrators in oppressing the victims.

Leonard Bernstein photo

“The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama. Act one: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act two: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act three: Greed and hypocrisy … I don't dare continue.”

Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist

Leonard Bernstein: The Gift Of Music

“Industry shares a need common to every social enterprise from church to guild, municipality to empire, war to university.”

Oliver Sheldon (1894–1951) British businessman

Oliver Sheldon. Philosophy of Management. London: Isaac Pitman and Sons; 1930, p. 33. As cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 8

Chris Hedges photo

“Trump’s most unforgivable sin in the eyes of the deep state is his criticism of the empire’s endless wars, even though he lacks the intellectual and organizational skills to oversee a disengagement.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

"The Enemy Within" (2019)

Rex Tillerson photo

“​The places I come from, we don’t deal with that kind of petty nonsense… I’m just not going to be part of this effort to divide this administration​.”

Rex Tillerson (1952) 69th United States Secretary of State

Remark about the "moron" remark. As quoted in [Flegenheimer, Matt, Oct. 4 2017, ‘Petty Nonsense’ of Washington: Tillerson Joins in Thrashing the Capital, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/us/politics/tillerson-trump-moron.html, New York Times, Mar. 20 2018]

Related topics