Monarch Quotes

“One to be a murderer, the other to be martyred, One to be a monarch, the other to go mad.”
― Marissa Meyer, Heartless

“My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.”
― Elizabeth I

“The sign of a good leader is easy to recognize, though it is hardly ever seen. For the greatest leaders are those who share as equals in the trials and struggles, the demands and expectations, the hills and trenches, the laws and punishments placed upon the backs of those governed. A great leader is motivated not by power but by compassion. Therefore he can do nothing but make himself a servant to those whom he rules. Such a leader is unequivocally respected, and loved for loving.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“The advantages of a hereditary Monarchy are self-evident. Without some such method of prescriptive, immediate and automatic succession, an interregnum intervenes, rival claimants arise, continuity is interrupted and the magic lost. Even when Parliament had secured control of taxation and therefore of government; even when the menace of dynastic conflicts had receded in to the coloured past; even when kingship had ceased to be transcendental and had become one of many alternative institutional forms; the principle of hereditary Monarchy continued to furnish the State with certain specific and inimitable advantages.

Apart from the imponderable, but deeply important, sentiments and affections which congregate around an ancient and legitimate Royal Family, a hereditary Monarch acquires sovereignty by processes which are wholly different from those by which a dictator seizes, or a President is granted, the headship of the State. The King personifies both the past history and the present identity of the Nation as a whole. Consecrated as he is to the service of his peoples, he possesses a religious sanction and is regarded as someone set apart from ordinary mortals. In an epoch of change, he remains the symbol of continuity; in a phase of disintegration, the element of cohesion; in times of mutability, the emblem of permanence. Governments come and go, politicians rise and fall: the Crown is always there. A legitimate Monarch moreover has no need to justify his existence, since he is there by natural right. He is not impelled as usurpers and dictators are impelled, either to mesmerise his people by a succession of dramatic triumphs, or to secure their acquiescence by internal terrorism or by the invention of external dangers. The appeal of hereditary Monarchy is to stability rather than to change, to continuity rather than to experiment, to custom rather than to novelty, to safety rather than to adventure.

The Monarch, above all, is neutral. Whatever may be his personal prejudices or affections, he is bound to remain detached from all political parties and to preserve in his own person the equilibrium of the realm. An elected President – whether, as under some constitutions, he be no more than a representative functionary, or whether, as under other constitutions, he be the chief executive – can never inspire the same sense of absolute neutrality. However impartial he may strive to become, he must always remain the prisoner of his own partisan past; he is accompanied by friends and supporters whom he may seek to reward, or faced by former antagonists who will regard him with distrust. He cannot, to an equal extent, serve as the fly-wheel of the State.”
― Harold Nicholson

“..parasites seldom altogether abandon a monarch so long as the crown still glitters on his head. (“The Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah”)”
― William Beckford, The Episodes of Vathek

“All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on,
From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.”
― John Wilmot, The Complete Poems

“By the time Cheryl Hersha came to the facility, knowledge of multiple personality was so complete that doctors understood how the mind separated into distinct ego states, each unaware of the other. First, the person traumatized had to be both extremely intelligent and under the age of seven, two conditions not yet understood though remaining consistent as factors. The trauma was almost always of a sexual nature… (p52)”
― Cheryl Hersha, Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country

“Not one word was said by Moses or Aaron as to the wickedness of depriving a human being of his liberty. Not a word was said in favor of liberty. Not the slightest intimation that a human being was justly entitled to the product of his own labor. Not a word about the cruelty of masters who would destroy even the babes of slave mothers. It seems to me wonderful that this God did not tell the king of Egypt that no nation could enslave another, without also enslaving itself; that it was impossible to put a chain around the limbs of a slave, without putting manacles upon the brain of the master. Why did he not tell him that a nation founded upon slavery could not stand? Instead of declaring these things, instead of appealing to justice, to mercy and to liberty, he resorted to feats of jugglery. Suppose we wished to make a treaty with a barbarous nation, and the president should employ a sleight-of-hand performer as envoy extraordinary, and instruct him, that when he came into the presence of the savage monarch, he should cast down an umbrella or a walking stick, which would change into a lizard or a turtle; what would we think? Would we not regard such a performance as beneath the dignity even of a president? And what would be our feelings if the savage king sent for his sorcerers and had them perform the same feat? If such things would appear puerile and foolish in the president of a great republic, what shall be said when they were resorted to by the creator of all worlds? How small, how contemptible such a God appears!”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“Come let us haste, the stars grow high,
But night sits monarch yet in the mid sky.”
― John Milton, Milton's Comus

“I have to be seen to be believed.”
― Queen Elizabeth II

“The king poured maple syrup on his waffle. The syrup puddled the depressions in the waffle the way that desire puddles the folds in the brain”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“I remember having an argument with Alan, I said the Queen's not just going to call the guy up and send him out to do it. And Alan says, well, how would a monarch give orders to her assassin.”
― Eddie Campbell

“When a monarch becomes a moneylender, democracy begins.”
― Mantaranjot Mangat, Plotless

“Simply put, Ellie Watson was her own person. And to speculate on why she did what she did when she did it, one might just as well wonder why a monarch butterfly, having flown from Mexico to Nebraska in the month of May, happens to land on one flower instead of another”
― Amor Towles, A Whimsy of the World

“There can never be a king in a free country of honourable people! Monarch, Kaiser, emperor, dictator, Caesar or shah, they all belong to the submissive and weak minded societies!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“[And conversely, Woodrow Wilson finishes dead last.]
Yes [...] I think World War I was avoidable for the United States, certainly; we kind of look back on Germany as being 'evil' (because of World War II), but back in World War I it was much more ambiguous who was at fault - and the allies, including our French and British allies and the Russians also were at fault - and after World War I there was a revulsion because the Bolsheviks released their correspondences with Britain and France: Britain and France were trying to grab colonies, and so the American people said, 'We were fighting...we lost all these people in this massive war just to help these people grab territory?' So there was a revulsion at that time; we don't hear that now because we're distant from it.

Woodrow Wilson has been elevated as one of the better presidents but I think if you go back and look at it, the war was avoidable...and of course Woodrow Wilson helped bring Hitler to power by insisting on the abdication of the Kaiser after World War I - which was totally unnecessary. Germany was a constitutional monarchy before the war, and was vilified. It was actually the most aggressive state in Europe [...] and there were many things wrong with the Kaiser's personality, but I think Germany is unnecessarily vilified for that war.”
― Ivan Eland

“There is one thing we are sure: For the honor of humanity, all the kings and all the queens, all the kingdoms and all the monarchies must be abolished!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Nor did we know if the tight, dark days of hanging upside down was the onset of death or a necessary part of an incredible transformation.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Monarchy Sonnet

Bloodline doesn't determine destiny,
Only determination can do that.
Biology doesn't see royalty,
Only bugs without backbone do that.
They say above the law is nobody,
Yet the royalty makes their own law.
If this is what civilization is about,
It's much better to be an outlaw.
The very existence of monarchy,
Is a sign of a medieval society.
We deny visa to hopes and ambition,
Yet kings and queens receive undeniable loyalty.
So I address the monarchs of planet earth,
Grow up and give your character a real birth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Boldly Comes Justice: Sentient Not Silent

“However, it was best known to the delegates as stated by the French thinker Montesquieu. He pointed out that "When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or the same body of magistry, there can be no liberty; because apprehension may arise lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.”
― Christopher Collier, Creating the Constitution: 1787

“Here the walls have ears. Spies are stationed behind every drapery, curtain, arras. Your spies, the agents of your secret service: their assignment is to draft detailed reports on the palace conspiracies. The court teems with enemies, to such an extent that it is increasingly difficult to tell them from friends; it is known for sure that the conspiracy that will dethrone you will be made up of your ministers and officials. And you know that every secret service has been infiltrated by agents of the opposing secret service. Perhaps all the agents in your pay work also for the conspirators, are themselves conspirators; and thus you are obliged to continue paying them, to keep them quiet as long as possible.
Voluminous bundles of secret reports are turned out daily by electronic machines and laid at your feet on the steps of the throne. It is pointless for you to read them: your spies can only confirm the existence of the conspiracies, justifying the necessity of your espionage; and at the same time they must deny any immediate danger, to prove that their spying is effective. No one, for that matter, thinks you must read the reports delivered to you; the light in the throne room is inadequate for reading, and the assumption is that a king need not read anything, the king already knows what he has to know.”
― Italo Calvino

“Throne In Confusion by Stewart Stafford

The sacked castle casts smoke on the lake,
Cinders’ glow distinguishes it from the mist,
The only gallows the noble knights adorned,
Were ones lowering them onto their steeds.

Thundering warhorses charged the enemy,
Storming across such a gallant battlefield,
Mortal combat with axe, blade and sword,
For king, country and all of Heaven’s glory.

Intruders rush over a downed drawbridge,
Rotten and riddled in darkness incarnate,
To a peregrinating, riderless throne room,
A neophyte sovereign in gold leaf crown.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“If Taravangian killed a child, he'd do it not for vengeance. Not for fury. Not for wealth or renown. But because he sincerely thought the child's death was necessary. He would call it good, then? No. He would acknowledge it as evil, would say it stains his soul. He says... that's the point of having a monarch. A man to wallow in blood, to be stained by it and destroyed by it, so that others might not suffer.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Rhythm of War

“The people think of wealth and power as the greatest fate,
But in this world, a spell of health is the best state.
What men call sovereignty is worldly strife and constant war;
Worship of God is the highest throne, the happiest of all estates.”
― Suleiman the Magnificent

“A ruler of peace,” I repeated with vicious annoyance. “You were not ruling under peaceful times, and a peaceful ruler—" I strained to find the words as my temper heated—"a peaceful ruler does not mean you do nothing.”
― Kailey Bright, Unity