We like to see underdogs win. But there is no justice in history. Most past cultures have sooner or later fallen prey to the armies of some ruthless empire, which have consigned them to oblivion. Empires, too, ultimately fall, but they tend to leave behind rich and enduring legacies. Almost all people in the twenty-first century are the offspring of one empire or another.

The history of empires is the history of human misery.

On my world we’re old, incredibly old, and we’ve learned a lot from a past which is long and lurid. We’ve had empires by the dozens, though none as great as yours. They all went the same way—down the sinkhole. They all vanished for the same fundamental and inevitable reasons. Empires come and empires go, but little men go on forever.

I made up my mind after reading the lessons of history never to dream of a vast world-empire. For what has become of all those so-called world-empires? Alexander, Napoleon and all such great captains bathed themselves in blood, and yet left behind them subjugated peoples, who, after those great men had died, rose in revolt and ruined the Empires they had created.

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

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

The whole track of history is marked with the ruin of empires which having been founded in injustice, or perpetuated by wrong, were ultimately destroyed.

no system of government, no economic system, no currency, and no empire lasts forever, yet almost everyone is surprised and ruined when they fail.

Empire is a very stimulating account of globalisation, but it is hopelessly wrong on two central issues. The state has not withered away. Strong states still exist—USA, China, Germany, etc—but the difference with the past is that there is now only one Empire and this is not the nebulous entity imagined by Cultural Studies, but a real, living organism and it has a name; the United States of America.

(theatrically) Do you realize, Dr. Seldon, that you are speaking of an Empire that has stood for twelve thousand years, through all the vicissitudes of the generations, and which has behind it the good wishes and love of a quadrillion human beings? A. I am aware both of the present status and the past history of the Empire. Without disrespect, I must claim a far better knowledge of it than any in this room. Q. And you predict its ruin? A. It is a prediction which is made by mathematics. I pass no moral judgements. Personally, I regret the prospect. Even if the Empire were admitted to be a bad thing (an admission I do not make), the state of anarchy which would follow its fall would be worse. It is that state of anarchy which my project is pledged to fight. The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity — a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.

Otherwise lacking internal support or external legitimacy, the US empire now banks on a pedigree of comprador intellectuals, homeless minds and guns for hire. All this to momentarily manufacture consent, to secure a selective memory, and to sustain a far more enduring collective amnesia that may perhaps serve immediate US imperial purposes well, but will ipso facto sustain its self-destructive force of building fictive sand castles near the factual waves of history. This empire will not last. No empire does. If empires lasted, the whole world would be speaking ancient Persian today. Native informers and the making of the American empire.

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed... History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized.... So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.

Such is the end of Empire.

Throughout the last ten thousand years of history, human empires rose and fall, crumbling into pebbles and dust. Over the last two hundred thousand years, an even larger empire began its mighty and perilous ascent. From its home base in Africa, it established its presence everywhere throughout the globe, expanding endlessly in all directions, growing exponentially in numbers, colonizing land, other species, and entire peoples. Insatiable in its consumption of natural resources, addicted to growth, it left death, extinction, and destruction everywhere in its wake. This vast conglomerate was not the Persian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Ottoman, English, or American empires, but the consequence and aggregate of all particular empires and unsustainable hierarchical societies, namely, the human empire.