Stalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia, on the periphery of the Russian Empire. His father was a hard-drinking cobbler whose relationship with Joseph’s mother, Keke Geladze, came to an end when the boy was around six years old.
Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.
After ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’ I got to make big films that I didn’t care about, ‘Never Say Never Again’ and ‘RoboCop 2,’ and then I got too old.
I don’t have a lot of time for television because I am making it, so it’s really hard for me to sit down. But when I do get a chance, I try to catch up on ‘Scandal,’ ‘Empire’ and ‘black-ish.’
This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.
I went into a Whole Foods to buy chewable vitamin C and got tackled by, like, 15 girls who watch ‘Empire.’
Using food as a way of understanding empire is highly effective. Food knows no barriers of race, gender or even time.
I still believe that even though ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ is better in innumerable ways than ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Star Wars’ wins.
To build an empire – or win seven Tour de Frances in a row – you must have a Lone Star-size ego and a dash of megalomania.
The difference between Amazon and us is Amazon is more like an empire – everything they control themselves, buy and sell.
The fate of the Celt in the British Empire bids fair to resemble that of the Greeks among the Romans.
There was a 3-foot-long model that was built for ‘New Hope,’ and then there was an 8-foot model that was built for ‘Empire Strikes Back.’ The 8-foot model and the 3-foot model are kind of different. A lot of the details are different between the two of them.
Look to the past and remember no empire rises that sooner or later won’t fall.
Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.
I think once ‘Empire’ hit, there was a lot of bad black TV that followed, because we work in the business of hit-seekers and copycats, so they’re like, ‘Oh this is a show about black people; this is about music, OK let’s do a version of that.’ And, of course, it doesn’t work because it’s not organic.
The roots of our statehood go back more than two millennia and two centuries to the origins of the Hun Empire. Building upon the legacies and power of the Huns, Mongols had built the largest land empire in the history of the mankind.
The Indian education system, like the Indian bureaucratic system, is Victorian and still in the 19th century. Our schools are still designed to produce clerks for an empire that does not exist anymore.
I never set out really to build a financial empire or to be a wealthy man.
Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike. Your dreams of creating a dry-cleaning empire won’t be helped by knowing that Thomas Edison liked to take naps.
I feel like I understand Trump’s character better than the average person now, having seen all of these little interactions with charity. I wanted to keep doing something that’s like that, and not just doing pure politics. So my piece of the Trump empire is the golf courses, Mar-a-Lago, and the winery.
Imagine a ‘Mission: Impossible’-style spy or infiltration mission into the core, the very heart of the Empire’s military-industrial complex, the most secure facility in the Empire. You have a small band of experts with complementary skills who, together, are able to do these amazing things.
When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don’t understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.
Whenever I say that America has become an empire, someone is sure to say I’m being ridiculous.
There has come into being a kind of a Shia belt from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut. And this gives Iran the opportunity to reconstruct the ancient Persian Empire – this time under the Shia label.
If that for which the Spanish Empire has stood since the days of Charles V is right, then everything for which the United States stands and has always stood is wrong.
I’m from the colonies, so I remember when the sun never set on the British Empire.
Someone that I’m really inspired by, and that I look up to, is Oprah. It’s amazing how she created such an empire.
On April 18, 1980, the last outpost of empire in Africa died. From Rhodesia’s ashes rose a country that would take its place among the free nations as Zimbabwe, the last among equals. And men and women leapt to embrace this dream called Zimbabwe.
All through the years of the Soviet empire, its Politburo held ‘elections.’ Of course, calling something an election and actually having it be an election are different things.
It does not seem to me to be sufficiently recognized everywhere among the officials that the existence or non-existence of our people and Empire is at stake.
I guess the most surprising discovery was how long Gandhi remained loyal to the ideal of the British Empire, even in India.
I’m very used to working with first time actors – you can just look back at ‘E.T.’ with Drew Barrymore, and Christian Bale from ‘Empire of the Sun,’ who’d never made a movie before.
I’ve got a lot that I want to do, so I would like to expand my empire, for sure. I love it.
I made ‘Empire of the Sun’ in Shanghai in the 1980s and want to come back one day to make a movie in China.
In the past, Britons were scathing about the cruelties of the old Roman empire and the excesses of Catholic empire builders such as the Spanish and the French. They convinced themselves that their empire was different and benign because it rested on sea power and trade rather than on armies.
Basically, what Economic Hit Men are trained to do is to build up the American empire. To create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we’ve been very successful.
Any book on empire will omit, by necessity, vast tracts of the imperial experience, and so critics can easily find facts and details to contradict an author’s bold generalisations.
Realism is always subjective in film. There’s no such thing as cinema verite. The only true cinema verite would be what Andy Warhol did with his film about the Empire State Building – eight hours or so from one angle, and even then it’s not really cinema verite, because you aren’t actually there.
I have behind me not only the splendid traditions and the annals of more than a thousand years but the living strength and majesty of the Commonwealth and Empire; of societies old and new; of lands and races different in history and origins but all, by God’s Will, united in spirit and in aim.
The British especially have no excuse for forgetting that empire is a most complex and persistent beast. And it has claws.
No one could seriously dispute that almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, all of North Africa except Morocco, all of the Middle East except Israel and Jordan and most of the oil-rich states, and the entire former British Indian Empire were better governed by Europeans.
The movie I’ve seen a million times – wait, that’s not possible – my favorite movie of all times is ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’ directed by Irvin Kershner, executive-produced by the great George Lucas and stars Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones.
‘Empire of the Sun’ is one of the films that I often think about. I think it had a profound effect on me when I first watched it as a teenager.
It makes one sad to see the sell-out of President Fox; really, it makes one sad. How sad that the president of a people like the Mexicans lets himself become the puppy dog of the empire.
So we make this big loan, most of it comes back to the United States, the country is left with the debt plus lots of interest, and they basically become our servants, our slaves. It’s an empire. There’s no two ways about it. It’s a huge empire. It’s been extremely successful.
I love ‘Boardwalk Empire.’
Makers of empire, they have fought for bigger things than crowns and higher seats than thrones.
Modern Armenia survived only because it was the single province controlled, and protected, by the Russian Empire. The rest of the territory within its historical borders is almost wholly devoid of ethnic Armenians.
There are probably less than 100 actors who make more than we do across our empire.
America might be a dying empire, but it’s not going to die in our lifetime – and it doesn’t have to die at all.
An entire empire built on teenage angst, yes? Thank you, John Hughes!
All comparisons between America’s current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the Roman Empire.
Our purpose in Vietnam is to prevent the success of aggression. It is not conquest, it is not empire, it is not foreign bases, it is not domination. It is, simply put, just to prevent the forceful conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam.
