Kings Quotes

“Kings are the slaves of history.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.”
― Queen Elizabeth I

“Those candle flames were like the lives of men. So fragile. So deadly. Left alone, they lit and warmed. Let run rampant, they would destroy the very things they were meant to illuminate. Embryonic bonfires, each bearing a seed of destruction so potent it could tumble cities and dash kings to their knees.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“To gain everything and lose everything in the space of a moment. That is the fate of all princes destined for the throne.”
― C.S. Pacat, Kings Rising

“And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.”
― John Milton, The Complete Poetry

“Most of the mess that is called history comes about because kings and presidents cannot be satisfied with a nice chicken and a good loaf of bread.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

“I am very comfortable with conflict, be it of the legal or mortal kind. My father was a mediator, a bridge maker. I am a grave maker.”
― J.R. Ward, Lover at Last

“The blood you spill is the blood of kings,” seethed Dunyasha. “You are not fit for such a gift.”
[...]
Inej raised a brow and slowly wiped the blood of kings on her trousers”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“Little by little, the old world crumbled, and not once did the king imagine that some of the pieces might fall on him.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

“History books say that kings and dukes and generals start wars. Don't believe it. We start them, you and I. Every time we turn away, keep quiet, stay out of it, behave ourselves.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, Stepsister

“My Crown is in my heart, not on my head:
Not deck'd with Diamonds, and Indian stones:
Nor to be seen: my Crown is call'd Content,
A Crown it is, that seldom Kings enjoy.”
― William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 3

“Of course, Nikolai was the liar here. But kings did what they wished; bastards did what they must.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Rule of Wolves

“There is a darkness in you. In all of us, probably. Beasts we keep chained. Ordinary men have to keep the chains strong, for if we let the beast loose then society will turn upon us with fiery vengeance. Kings though...well, who is there to turn upon them? So the chains are made of straw. It is the curse of kings, Helikaon, that they can become monsters. And they invariably do.”
― David Gemmell, Shield of Thunder

“ In the privacy of my dreams, I'm a warrior.”
― Kimberly Derting, The Essence

“It's like chess, you know. The Queen saves the King.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd's Crown

“Several of them were discussing this in low tones as they waited for Halt to arrive - until they realized that he was already among them. They weren't used to this. Kings were supposed to sweep into a room majestically - not suddenly appear without anyone seeing their arrival.”
― John Flanagan, The Kings of Clonmel

“Kings need not raise their voices to be heard.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Conjuring of Light

“For surely a king is first a man. And so it must follow that a king does as all men do: the best he can.”
― Cameron Dokey, The Storyteller's Daughter

“Pitiful and pitied by no one, why have I come to the ignominy of this detestable old age, who was ruler of two kingdoms, mother of two kings? My guts are torn from me, my family is carried off and removed from me. The young king [crown prince Henry, †1183] and the count of Britanny [prince Geoffrey, †1186] sleep in dust, and their most unhappy mother is compelled to be irremediably tormented by the memory of the dead. Two sons remain to my solace, who today survive to punish me, miserable and condemned. King Richard [the Lionheart] is held in chains [in captivity with Emperor Henry VI of Germany]. His brother, John, depletes his kingdom with iron [the sword] and lays it waste with fire. In all things the Lord has turned cruel to me and attacked me with the harshness of his hand. Truly his wrath battles against me: my sons fight amongst themselves, if it is a fight where where one is restrained in chains, the other, adding sorrow to sorrow, undertakes to usurp the kingdom of the exile by cruel tyranny. Good Jesus, who will grant that you protect me in hell and hide me until your fury passes, until the arrows which are in me cease, by which my whole spirit is sucked out?"

[Third letter to Pope Celestine (1193)]”
― Eleanor of Aquitaine

“But what are kings, when regiment is gone,
But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?

- Edward II, 5.1”
― Christopher Marlowe

“This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“إن بلادنا في حاجة إلى جرعات قوية من قلة الأدب حيال الملوك حتى تفيق من إغمائها الطويل”
― Naguib Mahfouz, Sugar Street

“Why do the Gods make kings and queens if not to protect the ones who can't protect themselves?”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse.

And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humoured these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.”
― Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree

“This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England. In strict constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“It is unwise to let a man who isn't king sit on a throne for too long.”
― Costanza Casati, Clytemnestra

“How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot.”
― Christiaan Huygens, Cosmotheoros: or, conjectures concerning the inhabitants of the planets

“Perhaps this is what a state actually is: a combination of exceptional violence and the creation of a complex social machine, all ostensibly devoted to acts of care and devotion.

There is obviously a paradox here. Caring labour is in a way the very opposite of mechanical labour: it is about recognizing and understanding the unique qualities, needs and peculiarities of the cared-for – whether child, adult, animal or plant – in order to provide what they require to flourish. Caring labour is distinguished by its particularity. If those institutions we today refer to as ‘states’ really do have any common features, one must certainly be a tendency to displace this caring impulse on to abstractions; today this is usually ‘the nation’, however broadly or narrowly defined. Perhaps this is why it’s so easy for us to see ancient Egypt as a prototype for the modern state: here too, popular devotion was diverted on to grand abstractions, in this case the ruler and the elite dead. This process is what made it possible for the whole arrangement to be imagined, simultaneously, as a family and as a machine, in which everyone (except of course the king) was ultimately interchangeable. From the seasonal work of tomb-building to the daily servicing of the ruler’s body (recall again how the first royal inscriptions are found on combs and make-up palettes), most of human activity was directed upwards, either towards tending rulers (living and dead) or assisting them with their own task of feeding and caring for the gods.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“Well, what do they all amount to, these kings and captains and bishops and lawyers and such like? They just leave you in the ditch to bleed to death; and the next thing is, you meet them down there, for all the airs they give themselves.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan