#monarch

It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear me, ANY kind of royalty, howsoever modified, ANY kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its aristocracies -- a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions... The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world. And for all this, the thanks they got were cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they took even this sort of attention as an honor. ↗

— Mark Twain

#government #monarchy #religion #serfdom #slavery

Public opinion is the thermometer a monarch should constantly consult. ↗

— Napoleon Bonaparte

#consult #monarch #opinion #public #public opinion

All things are subject to decay and when fate summons, monarchs must obey. ↗

— John Dryden

#decay #fate #monarchs #must #obey

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs. ↗

— Epicurus

#because #cannot #easy #free #free life

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry. ↗

— Harold Wilson

#intensive #labor #monarchy

Slavery to monarchs and ministers, which the world will be long freeing itself from, and whose deadly grasp stops the progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished. ↗

— Mary Wollstonecraft

#freeing #grasp #human #human mind #itself

Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule. ↗

— Edward Gibbon

#forms #government #hereditary #monarchy #present

Democracy... while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide. ↗

— John Adams

#bloody #commit #democracy #did #either

It's vital that the monarchy keeps in touch with the people. It's what I try and do. ↗

— Princess Diana

#keeps #monarchy #people #touch #try

The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another - no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy. ↗

— Friedrich Engels

#class #democratic #democratic republic #instrument #less