“Commerce is so far from being beneficial to Arts or to Empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their History shows, for the above Reason of Individual Merit being its Great Hatred. Empires flourish till they become Commercial & then they are scattered abroad to the four winds”
Public Address, Blake's Notebook c. 1810
1810s
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William Blake 249
English Romantic poet and artist 1757–1827Related quotes

As quoted in Anna Politkovskaya: Putin, poison and my struggle for freedom https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/anna-politkovskaya-putin-poison-and-my-struggle-for-freedom-535250.html (15 October 2004), The Independent.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm Native informers and the making of the American empire

Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses
1790s

"Appeal to Nobles", (June 1853), Imperial Russia, A Source Book 1700-1917

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)