{"quotes":[{"text":"The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and penal code, the liberté, égalité, fraternité and the second of May 1852—all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a magician. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: Everything that exists has this much worth, that it will perish.","author":"Karl Marx","tags":["itarian","itarianism","bourgeois","brumaire","cipolla","constitution","coup-d-etat","dictator","dictatorship","dynasty","fascism","france","french-republic","louis-bonaparte","magician","mario-and-the-magician","monarchy","mountebank","napoleon","press","republicans","revolution","socialism","spell","suffrage","third-republic"],"id":8439,"author_id":"Karl+Marx"},{"text":"She now discovered amidst them, the poet's flights of fancy, and the historian's seldom pleasing—ever instructive page. The first may transmit to posterity the records of a sublime genius, which once flashed in strong, but transient rays, through the tenement of clay it was given a moment to inhabit: and though the tenement decayed and the spirit fled, the essence of a mind which darted through the universe to cull each created and creative image to enrich an ever-varying fancy, is thus snatched from oblivion, and retained, spite of nature, amidst the mortality from which it has struggled, and is freed. The page of the historian can monarchs behold, and not offer up the sceptre to be disencumbered of the ponderous load that clogs their elevation! Can they read of armies stretch upon the plain, provinces laid waste, and countries desolated, and wish to be the mortal whose vengeance, or whose less fierce, but fatal decision sent those armies forth!","author":"Mary Charlton","tags":["history","monarchy","mortality","poetry","politics","war"],"id":17889,"author_id":"Mary+Charlton"},{"text":"...Men unite against none so readily as against those whom theysee attempting to rule over them.","author":"Xenophon","tags":["government","monarchy","war"],"id":19636,"author_id":"Xenophon"},{"text":"The nobles had made reading unpopular, as it showed that one couldn’t afford to buy spells or magical devices, since one had to get knowledge to do things the ordinary way; even if this view held little logic, the king himself was known to insult readers as “bookfaces” or “unable to think for themselves, so they need to spout what others have said,” and these opinions became popular, as did most views expressed by the king or his son.","author":"Colleen Chen","tags":["bookish","books","dictator","intelligence","learning","logic","monarchy","nerds","nerdy","popularity","propaganda","reading","thinking","twisted"],"id":31573,"author_id":"Colleen+Chen"},{"text":"The modern absolutism, which we find the most natural thing in the world, would have been quite beyond the dreams of the most absolute of kings.","author":"Bertrand De Jouvenel","tags":["absolutism","ity","monarchy","political-history","politics","power"],"id":31906,"author_id":"Bertrand+De+Jouvenel"},{"text":". . . Kings, aristocrats, tyrants, whoever they be, are slaves rebelling against the sovereign of the earth, which is the human race, and against the legislator of the universe, which is n.","author":"Maximilien de Robespierre","tags":["enlightenment","french-revolution","monarchy","political-science","social-contract"],"id":81753,"author_id":"Maximilien+de+Robespierre"},{"text":"They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was.","author":"Ray Bradbury","tags":["leadership","monarchy","unlimited-power"],"id":111380,"author_id":"Ray+Bradbury"},{"text":"Once more, I am watching the most powerful men in the kingdom bring their power to bear on a woman who has done nothing worse than live to the beat of her own heart, see with her own eyes; but this is not their tempo nor their vision and they cannot tolerate any other.","author":"Philippa Gregory","tags":["historical-fiction","monarchy","women"],"id":112211,"author_id":"Philippa+Gregory"},{"text":"Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy—not that this is the intention of the generality of them. Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected. When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government \u0026 bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.","author":"Alexander Hamilton","tags":["anarchy","fearmongering","hamilton","monarchy","trump","unprincipled","zealot"],"id":121843,"author_id":"Alexander+Hamilton"},{"text":"After a democratic interlude the 'monarchy' returns with a vengeance, returns by the back door, camouflaged, masked and diabolically perverted—a blood-curdling metamorphosis we know only from nightmares or surrealist films. The reassertion of the natural father-urge does not result in the restitution of the paternal kingdom but in the rise of the Terrifying Father, a Krónos devouring his own children, who are paralyzed by his magnetic glare like rabbits facing a boa constrictor.","author":"Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn","tags":["democracy","dictatorship","monarchy"],"id":125869,"author_id":"Erik+von+Kuehnelt-Leddihn"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":46,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}