“Revolutionaries knew quite well that the autocratic Empire, with its hangmen, its pogroms, its finery, its famines, its Siberian jails and ancient iniquity, could never survive the war.”

De Re Publica, Book 3, Chapter 23

Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Second Foundation (1953), Chapter 12 “Lord”

1990s, Long Walk to Freedom (1995)

Source: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), Chapter 6, Great Powers in Action, p. 202

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: Language can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable. Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?

VALIS (1981)
Context: To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement … Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus … thereby it becomes its enemies.

Source: Death: A Poetical Essay (1759), Line 178.

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88 Precepts