C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Kings
A king should be a king in all things.
There’s such divinity doth hedge a king.
Every monarch is subject to a mightier one.
The right divine of kings to govern wrong!
The king’s name is a tower of strength.
A good king is a public servant.
The king that faithfully judgeth the poor, his throne shall be established forever.
He on whom heaven confers a sceptre knows not the weight till he bears it.
Implements of war and subjugation are the last arguments to which kings resort.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
Whoever is king, is also the father of his country.
Empire! thou poor and despicable thing, when such as these make or unmake a king!
A man’s a man; but when you see a king, you see the work of many thousand men.
Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.
A king is the first servant and first magistrate of the state.
Kings are for nations in their swaddling-clothes: France has attained her majority.
The king is but a man, as I am, the violet smells to him as it does to me.
O, unhappy state of kings! it is well the robe of majesty is gay, or who would put it on?
A crown! what is it? It is to bear the miseries of a people,—to hear their murmurs, feel their discontents, and sink beneath a load of splendid care.
Within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king, keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits, scoffing his state.
The example alone of a vicious prince will corrupt an age; but that of a good one will not reform it.
The people are fashioned according to the example of their king, and edicts are of less power than the model which his life exhibits.
When a king sets himself to bandy against the highest court and residence of all regal powers, he then, in the single person of a man, fights against his own majesty and kingship.
A king may be a tool, a thing of straw; but if he serves to frighten our enemies, and secure our property, it is well enough; a scarecrow is a thing of straw, but it protects the corn.
One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is, that Nature disapproves it; otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass in place of a lion.