All wars today tend to be netwars.

When the general population no longer constitutes the armed forces, when the army is no longer the people in arms, then empires fall. Today all armies are again tending to become mercenary armies.

The possibility of democracy on a global scale is emerging today for the very first time.

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.

A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration.

Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts.

No effective blueprint [of a political alternative to Empire] will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours.

The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.

It is a commonplace of the classical literature on Empire, from Polybius to Montesquieu and Gibbon, that Empire is from its inception decadent and corrupt.

Reality and history, however, are not dialectical, and no idealist rhetorical gymnastics can make them conform to the dialect.