Royalty

"An hiatus in government is so detested and abhorred, that the law says, "the King never dies," that there may never be a "cesser" of regal functions for a moment."

"Here lies our sovereign lord, the king, Whose word no man relies on, Who never said a foolish thing, And never did a wise one."

"Here lies our mutton-looking king, Whose word no man relied on, Who never said a foolish thing, Nor ever did a wise one."

"Even in thy tent I’ll seize the blooming prize, Thy loved Briseïs with the radiant eyes. Hence shalt thou prove my might, and curse the hour Thou stood’st a rival of imperial power; And hence, to all our hosts it shall be known, That kings are subject to the gods alone."

"Wenn die Könige bau'n, haben die Kärmer zu thun."

"In your opinion, India means its few princes. To me it means its teeming millions on whom depends the existence of its princes and our own. Kings will always use their kingly weapons. To use force is bred in them. They want to command, but those who have to obey commands do not want guns: and these are in a majority throughout the world."

"Proud is the heart of kings, fostered of heaven; for their honour is from Zeus, and Zeus, god of counsel, loveth them."

"Savoir dissimuler est le savoir des rois."

"The Great Pirate [ruled]... And when the next bright boy was brought before him the King was to say, “I’m going to make you my Royal Treasurer,” and so forth... Then the Pirate said to the king, “You will finally say to all of them: ‘But each of you must mind your own business or off go your heads. I’m the only one who minds everybody’s business ”... This is the way schools began — as the royal tutorial schools. You realize, I hope, that I am not being facetious. That is it. This is the beginning of schools and colleges and the beginning of intellectual specialization."

"The state of Monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth; for kings are not only God's lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called gods."

"The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones."

"O Richard! O my king! The universe forsakes thee!"

"An nescis longos regibus esse manus?"

"The King is dead! Long live the King!"

"The Great Pirate came into each of the various lands where he either acquired or sold goods profitably and picked the strongest man there to be his local head man... If the Great Pirate's local strong man in a given land had not already done so, the Great Pirate told him to proclaim himself king... the Great Pirate allowed and counted upon his king-stooge to convince his countrymen that he, the local king, was indeed the head man of all men -the god—ordained ruler. To guarantee that sovereign claim the Pirates gave their stooge-kings secret lines of supplies which provided everything required to enforce the sovereign claim. The more massively bejewelled the king’s gold crown, and the more visible his court and castle, the less visible was his pirate master. Ch. II, Origins of specialization"

"What is a king? a man condemn'd to bear The public burthen of the nation's care."

"Si la bonne foi était bannie du reste du monde, il faudrait qu'on la trouvât dans la bouche des rois."

"Over all things certain, this is sure indeed, Suffer not the old King, for we know the breed."

"A man's a man, But when you see a king, you see the work Of many thousand men."

"Ah! vainest of all things Is the gratitude of kings."

"The so-called British Empire was a manifest of the world - around misconception of who ran things and a disclosure of the popular ignorance of the Great Pirates’ absolute world-controlling through their local-stooge sovereigns and their prime ministers, as only innocuously and locally modified here and there by the separate sovereignties’ internal democratic processes... The British Isles lying off the coast of Europe constituted in effect a fleet of unsinkable ships and naval bases commanding all the great harbors of Europe. Those islands were the possession of the topmost Pirates."

"In those ancient days, when the good destinies had been decreed, and after An and Enlil had set up the divine rules of heaven and earth, then ... Enki, the master of destinies, ... founded cities and settlements throughout the earth, and made the black-headed multiply. He provided them with a king as shepherd, elevating him to sovereignty over them; the king rose as the daylight over the foreign countries."

"No bishop, no king."

"What happened at the time of Leonardo and Galileo was that mathematics was so unproved by the advent of the zero that not only was much more scientific shipbuilding made possible but also much more reliable navigation. Immediately thereafter truly large-scale venturing on the world’s oceans commenced, and the strong sword-leader patrons as designing their new and more powerful world-girdling ships...The topmost Great Pirates... developed the comprehensive strategy for running the world for a century to come."

"KING, n. A male person commonly known in America as a "crowned head," although he never wears a crown and has usually no head to speak of."

"Le roi règne, il ne gouverne pas."

"'Tis so much to be a king, that he only is so by being so."

"But there is another and great distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into KINGS and SUBJECTS. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of Heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind."

"But all's to no end, for the times will not mend Till the King enjoys his own again."

"I loved no King since Forty One When Prelacy went down, A Cloak and Band I then put on, And preached against the Crown."

"God bless the King—I mean the faith's defender; God bless (no harm in blessing) the pretender; But who the pretender is, or who is King— God bless us all—that's quite another thing."

"Fallitur egregio quisquis sub principe credet Servitutem. Nunquam libertas gratior extat Quam sub rege pio."

"The king never dies."

"The rule Of the many is not well. One must be chief In war and one the king."

"Malheureuse France! Malheureux roi!"

"Der König herrscht aber regiert nicht."

"Now let us sing, long live the king."

"Jehovah has become King … He sits enthroned above the cherubs."

"Nations will go to your light And kings to your shining splendor."

"Fear God. Honour the King."

"In the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed. And this kingdom will not be passed on to any other people. It will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, and it alone will stand forever, just as you saw that out of the mountain a stone was cut not by hands, and that it crushed the iron, the copper, the clay, the silver, and the gold. The Grand God has made known to the king what will happen in the future. The dream is true, and its interpretation is trustworthy."

"On the king's gate the moss grew gray; The king came not. They call'd him dead; And made his eldest son, one day, Slave in his father's stead."

"Have you beheld a man skillful in his work? Before kings is where he will station himself; he will not station himself before commonplace men."

"The king is a lion."

"Tout citoyen est roi sous un roi citoyen."

"There's such divinity doth hedge a king, That treason can but peep to what it would."

"Hideux dans leur apothéose Les rois de la mine et du rail Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose Que dévaliser le travail ? Dans les coffres-forts de la bande Ce qu'il a créé s'est fondu En décrétant qu'on le lui rende Le peuple ne veut que son dû."

"Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own."

"Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans"

"But Elias did propose an exogenous trigger to get the whole thing started, indeed, two triggers. The first was the consolidation of a genuine Leviathan after centuries of anarchy in Europe’s feudal patchwork of baronies and fiefs. Centralized monarchies gained in strength, brought the warring knights under their control, and extended their tentacles into the outer reaches of their kingdoms. According to the military historian Quincy Wright, Europe had five thousand independent political units (mainly baronies and principalities) in the 15th century, five hundred at the time of the Thirty Years’ War in the early 17th, two hundred at the time of Napoleon in the early 19th, and fewer than thirty in 1953. The consolidation of political units was in part a natural process of agglomeration in which a moderately powerful warlord swallowed his neighbors and became a still more powerful warlord. But the process was accelerated by what historians call the military revolution: the appearance of gunpowder weapons, standing armies, and other expensive technologies of war that could only be supported by a large bureaucracy and revenue base. A guy on a horse with a sword and a ragtag band of peasants was no match for the massed infantry and artillery that a genuine state could put on the battlefield. As the sociologist Charles Tilly put it, “States make war and vice-versa.” Turf battles among knights were a nuisance to the increasingly powerful kings, because regardless of which side prevailed, peasants were killed and productive capacity was destroyed that from the kings’ point of view would be better off stoking their revenues and armies. And once they got into the peace business—“the king’s peace,” as it was called—they had an incentive to do it right. For a knight to lay down his arms and let the state deter his enemies was a risky move, because his enemies could see it as a sign of weakness. The state had to keep up its end of the bargain, lest everyone lose faith in its peacekeeping powers and resume their raids and vendettas."