“All empires have depended on local legitimacy and local collaboration; they are not based primarily on coercion. An imperial rule that relies wholly on coercion can't endure. It's too expensive.”
Niall Ferguson
“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things.”
Hans Christian Andersen
“Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson