Life & Wisdom Quote by Herbert Kaufman

Empire doesn’t arrive with a coronation; it arrives with a payroll, a port, and a map drawn in someone else’s ink. Kaufman’s line rejects the fairy-tale image of history as a parade of crowned heads and instead crowns a different cast: the builders, brokers, soldiers, administrators, and profiteers who actually make empires function. “Makers” is the tell. It’s a labor word, almost industrial, suggesting empire as manufacture rather than destiny. The phrase “bigger things than crowns” quietly demotes monarchy to a prop, a shiny distraction from the real project: control of land, trade routes, resources, and populations.

The rhetoric works by climbing. “Bigger things” becomes “higher seats,” and “thrones” becomes something you sit on, not something sacred. Kaufman is doing scale as persuasion: the aim isn’t to praise ambition so much as to reveal its true metric. The “higher seats” are boardrooms, governor’s mansions, cabinet rooms, command posts - places where decisions travel farther than any royal decree. It’s an early 20th-century insight delivered in heroic cadence: modern power is bureaucratic, logistical, and often anonymous.

Context matters. Kaufman wrote in an era when the British Empire still loomed, the U.S. was testing its imperial reach, and World War I had shown how mass organization could eclipse hereditary rule. The subtext is bracing: if you want to understand empire, stop watching the crown and start watching who gets the seat.