Conquest Quotes

“Greater in battle
than the man who would conquer
a thousand-thousand men,
is he who would conquer
just one —
himself.
Better to conquer yourself
than others.
When you've trained yourself,
living in constant self-control,
neither a deva nor gandhabba,
nor a Mara banded with Brahmas,
could turn that triumph
back into defeat.”
― Buddha

“At seventeen the young woman had worked out how to improve her future prospects; she would seduce the Prince.”
― Robert Reid, The Emperor

“This world is for those who are born to conquer it, Not for those who dream that are able to conquer it, even if they're right.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

“Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“Raimund, we must promise each other that if one of us leaves Mora it must be both. We must leave together.” She was not sure what had made her ask for this promise, but she was growing more aware of her femininity. She loved Raimund as a brother, but something told her that her feelings for him were more than those of a sibling.
Raimund smiled and squeezed her hand. “Of course Aleana, I am after all your brother.”
― Robert Reid, The Emperor

“Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“The self-esteem of western women is founded on physical being (body mass index, youth, beauty). This creates a tricky emphasis on image, but the internalized locus of self-worth saves lives. Western men are very different. In externalizing the source of their self-esteem, they surrender all emotional independence. (Conquest requires two parties, after all.) A man cannot feel like a man without a partner, corporation, team. Manhood is a game played on the terrain of opposites. It thus follows that male sense of self disintegrates when the Other is absent.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide

“Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“This was a moment Alberon had dreamed of, and he gave no thought to his lost and banished lover, although he did at times wonder about the child. Did he have a bastard son or a daughter? But it really did not matter any more. It was simply the mistake of a love struck youth.”
― Robert Reid, The Emperor

“I never met your likeness. Jane: you please me, and you master me - you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. I am influenced - conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express; and the conquest I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph _I_ can win.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Still, being fragile creatures, humans always try to hide from themselves the certainty that they will die. They do not see that it is death itself that motivates them to do the best things in their lives. They are afraid to step into the dark, afraid of the unknown, and their only way of conquering that fear is to ignore the fact that their days are numbered. They do not see that with an awareness of death, they would be able to be even more daring, to go much further in their daily conquests, because then they would have nothing to lose- for death itself is inevitable.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage

“The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“There’s just one thing I want to know.”

Julian nodded. “Anything.”

“When you peed and had sex outside, it wasn’t at the same time, was it? Because that’d be really
nasty.”
― S.J. Frost, Conquest

“His lips nuzzled her ear. “Whether you go or stay, I will love you until I die,” he whispered.”
― Teresa Medeiros, Lady of Conquest

“You are not a man anymore. You are a soldier. Your comfort is of no importance and your life isn’t of much importance. Most of your orders will be unpleasant, but that’s not your business.They should’ve trained you for this, and not for flower-strewn streets. They should have built your soul with truth, not led along with lies.”
― John Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down

“My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period.”
― Leon Uris

“Yet I now ask of you—are you marauders or are you servants? Do you give power to others, or do you hoard it? Do you fight not to have something, but rather fight so that others might one day have something? Is your blade a part of your soul, or is it a burden, a tool, to be used with care? Are you soldiers, my children, or are you savages?”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades

“Perhaps that is the greatest crime of conquest--that a civilization is denied the right to evolve beyond its own embarrassment.”
― Neal Shusterman, Downsiders

“When you have seen the errors in which you live, you will understand the good that we have done you by coming to your land by order of his Majesty the King of Spain. Our Lord permitted that your pride should be brought low and that no Indian should be able to offend a Christian.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“But you, Roman, must remember that you have to guide the nations by your authority, for this is to be your skill, to graft tradition onto peace, to shew mercy to the conquered, and to wage war until the haughty are brought low.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“One might think of the discovery and conquest of the farthest ends of the earth, the expanses of space, the labyrinthine recesses of the soul, and the depths of the self. And it is part of the dialectic of modernity that these depths are characterized, not only by positive values such as love, constructive desires, and gaiety, but also by the yawning abysses of horror, fear, and destruction. Conquest is always accompanied by destruction, the optimistic mood of discovery by the anxiety of existence.”
― Hubertus Kohle, Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst

“It is a wicked prayer to ask to have someone to hate or to fear, so that he may be someone to conquer.”
― Augustine of Hippo, City of God

“Not all soldiers wield spears.”
― Nick Oliveri, The Conjurer

“The State is born of the conquest of other people. The self-governing community is a creation of the people themselves in the process of overthrowing the State.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“Traveller said, 'I expect the Tiste Edur discovered rather quickly the curse of occupation. It acts like a newly opened wound, infecting and poisoning both the oppressors and the oppressed. Both cultures become malformed, bitter with extremes. Hatred, fear, greed, betrayal, paranoia , and appalling indifference to suffering.'

'Yet the Malazans occupied Seven Cities'

'No, Samar Dev. The Malazans conquered Seven Cities. That is different. Kellanved understood that much. If one must grip hard in enemy territory, then that grip must be hidden, at the very cusp of local power. And so no more than a handful is being strictly controlled, everyone else, merchants and herders and farmers and tradefolk, everyone, is to be shown better circumstances, as quickly as possible. "Conquer as a rogue wave, rule in quiet ripples." The Emperor's own words.”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds

“One-night stands are like chess, only the loser desires a rematch.”
― Jack Freestone

“What tyrant first dreamed of conquest and clad violent oppression in terms of virtue? Why does the imposition of one will over another draw men like no other sin? For more than two hundred years, the Emperor has demanded that the galaxy align itself to his principles at the cost of ten thousand cultures that lived free and without the need for tyranny. Now Horus demands that the stellar nations of this broken empire dance to his tune instead. Billions die for conquest, to advance the pride of these two vain creatures cast in the shapes of men.
There is no virtue in fighting for conquest. Nothing is more worthless and hollow than obliterating freedom for the sake of more land, more coin, more voices singing your name in holy hymn. Conquest is as meaningless as glory. Worse, it is an evil in its selfishness. Both are triumphs only in a fool's crusade.”
― Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Lord of the Red Sands

“Lands originally came under the rule of a particular sovereign by conquest; and conquest was recognized until the first part of the 20th century as a lawful means of acquiring territory. Nowadays title to territory can change only by peaceful means, such as the cession of the territory by treaty, or the long and unchallenged occupation of territory that can give rise to a title based upon prescription.”
― Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction

“They hurled him inside... into the song of a thousand sweetly singing flowers... and though he tried -- desperately -- to shut out those siren notes, they seeped into his mind... into his soul -- and that fine intelligence succumbed to a killing beauty...”
― Dennis O'Neil, Superman (1939-2011) #236