Quote by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

This quote, spoken by the decaying statue of Ozymandias, serves as a warning against arrogance and the fleeting nature of power. It means that even the greatest empires and rulers will eventually fall to ruin, and their boasts will be mocked by time, highlighting impermanence.

Published in 1818, "Ozymandias" was a potent commentary on the transient nature of political power and human ambition, written amidst the rise and fall of empires and monarchies in post-Napoleonic Europe.

English Romantic poet and radical political thinker whose major works include Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and Ozymandias. He was expelled from Oxford for atheism and spent much of his adult life in exile from England, dying by drowning in Italy at age twenty-nine.