Biography
"Royalty is a Government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A Republic is a Government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting things."
"As long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffuse feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding."
"Monarchy is based on a divine institution: the family. What is a family if not a small monarchy? The father is the king, the mother the queen, and the children are the faithful subjects. This structure provides stability. A king is not a tyrant but a guide who encourages the qualities of the people, restrains their faults, and leads them toward a common goal – just as a good father nurtures his children."
"MONARCH, n. A person engaged in reigning. Formerly the monarch ruled, as the derivation of the word attests, and as many subjects have had occasion to learn. In Russia and the Orient the monarch has still a considerable influence in public affairs and in the disposition of the human head, but in western Europe political administration is mostly entrusted to his ministers, he being somewhat preoccupied with reflections relating to the status of his own head."
"I esteem monarchy above any other form of government, and hereditary monarchy above elective. I reverence kings, their office, their rights, their persons; and it will never be owing to the principles I am going to establish, because the character and government of a patriot king can be established on no other, if their office and their right are not always held divine, and their persons always sacred."
"Among many reasons which determine me to prefer monarchy to every form of government, this is a principal one. When monarchy is the essential form, it may be more easily and more usefully tempered with aristocracy or democracy, or both, than either of them, when they are the essential forms, can be tempered with monarchy. It seems to me, that the introduction of a real permanent monarchical power, or any thing more than the pageantry of it, into either of these, must destroy them and extinguish them, as a great light extinguishes a less. Where it may easily be shewn, and the true form of our government will demonstrate, without seeking any other example, that very considerable aristocratical and democratical powers may be grafted on a monarchical stock, without diminishing the lustre, or restraining the power and authority of the prince, enough to alter in any degree the essential form."
"It's a sign of the tragic immaturity of Britain as a nation that we should be obsessed in the year 2000 with a reactionary old woman who has never done anything except act as a parasite on the body politic."
"Bolingbroke has one observation, which in my opinion, is not without depth and solidity. He says, that he prefers a monarchy to other governments; because you can better ingraft any description of republic on a monarchy than any thing of monarchy upon the republican forms. I think him perfectly in the right."
"The chief glory of Princes, and the chief of their Titles...is, That they are God's Deputies and Vicegerents here on earth; that they represent him, and by consequence, that they ought to resemble him. The outward respect paid them, carries a proportion to that Character of Divinity which is on them, and that supposes an imitation of the Divine Perfections in them."
"Britain is fortunate indeed in having a breed of distinguished people ...whom people come from all over the world to see. It would be an act of cruelty to impose that function of royalty on any normal family of citizens, but seeing that there is a family which is born to it as the fruit of a long historical evolution it would be an act of great political folly to establish a Presidency...I have such a strong sense of the political usefulness of British royalty to substantial and competent progressive forces in the society."
"Unreasonableness in royalty is a hereditary trait."
"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."
"The tendency of an advanced civilization is in truth Monarchy. Monarchy is indeed a government which requires a high degree of civilization for its full development. . . . An educated nation recoils from the imperfect vicariate of what is called a representative government."
"Aside from Switzerland, France (after the advent of the Third Republic) and a smattering of city-states, nearly all the states of Europe between 1815 and 1917 were either empires, kingdoms, principalities or grand duchies. In all of them, the office of head of state was hereditary, not elective. Between the more or less enlightened despotism of Russia and the liberal monarchy of Norway there was a bewildering variety of constitutional forms. Yet none of these entirely deprived the hereditary sovereign of power, nor did away with that crucial institution of government, the royal court. Moreover, quite apart from their domestic political powers - which remained great in terms of patronage even if they were circumscribed in other respects - the emperors, kings, queens, princes and grand dukes had a distinctive role in the sphere of interstate relations. Despite industrialization and all the other associated phenomena of modernization, dynastic politics still mattered. Wars were fought over the successions to the dukedoms of Schleswig and Holstein and the throne of Spain – to give just two examples - not merely because they furnished ingenious statesmen with convenient pretexts for nation-building. When attention is focused on the most important of all the nineteenth-century dynasties, the Saxe-Coburgs, it becomes apparent that there was much about this supposedly modern epoch that was still distinctly early-modern."
"Constitutional monarchies, through their structure, avoid those four republican perils: excessive rigidity, as in the American system, which is reduced to near paralysis whenever the President is seriously threatened with impeachment; political conflict and competition between the Head of State, Prime Minister and Ministers, a hallmark of the French Fifth Republic (an inherently unstable model curiously followed in a number of countries); extreme instability, which often haunted the Latin versions of Westminster; and regular resort to the rule of the street to solve conflict, which permeates those systems which live under the shadow of the French revolution."
"If instead of insisting on rights everyone does his duty, there will immediately be the rule of order established among mankind. There is no such thing as the divine right of kings to rule and the humble duty of the ryots to pay respectful obedience."
"Of the various forms of government that have prevailed in the world, a hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule."
"Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum; the reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution — perhaps the first modern political institution."
"A monarch's neck should always have a noose around it. It keeps him upright."
"In their last ditch, the royalists object that this is all too bloodless and practical; that people need and want the element of magic and fantasy. Nobody wants life to be charmless. But the element of fantasy and magic is as primitive as it is authentic, and there are good reasons why it should not come from the state. When orchestrated and distributed in that way, it leads to disappointment and rancour, and can lead to the enthronement of sillier or nastier idols."
"We know well that the Primitive Church in her greatest purity were but voluntary congregations of believers, submitting themselves to the Apostles, and after to other Pastors, to whom they did minister of their Temporals, as God did move them. So as Ecclesiasticus, cap. 17, says, God appointed a Ruler over every people, when he divided nations of the whole Earth. And therefore if a people will refuse all government, it were against the law of God; and yet if a popular State will receive a Monarchy it stands well with the Law of God."
"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 insuperable objection to monarchy is that the king or queen is elevated, and respect is accorded, for no reason other than birth ... No one who believes either in the claims of merit or in the pursuit of equality can defend the system."
"Government by royal power is representative, and to this extent Christian. The dialectic of monarchy is world-historically both well-established and unchanging."
"Monarchy was historically always the best protection against any sort of oligarchical rule and it was the historic role of monarchs to side with the lower classes against the nobility."