Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

If you're going to take a shot at the king. You know, you'd better kill him.

For the fate of Charles the first, hath only made kings more subtle — not more just.

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 humored these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.

If people were in the habit of refering to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang,' it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy.

I fantasize that our politicians have been moved by the dialogues of Plato, and thus contemplate the ancient conflict of the sophists versus the lovers of truth.

And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.

Very few people go into politics to be reviled.

The king must die so that the country can live.

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

All executive power --- from the reign of ancient kings to the rule of modern dictators --- has the outward appearance of efficiency

If you wish my opinion of Theodore Roosevelt, it is that he might make a passable king, a very fair newspaper man, an admirable circus impresario; but as President he is as monstrous as would be Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy in a Salome dance.

There is no middle course between the throne and the scaffold.

It has been my philosophy all my life that good government is good politics.

We want political power in our country for our philosophy of life. This means we've got to get involved more and more in politics.

When you strike at a king, you must kill him.

The tree of liberty could not grow were it not watered with the blood of tyrants

You need a head of state--with continuity. Sometimes this is more important than political power.

Monarchy is only the string that ties the robber's bundle.

The old Romans all wished to have a king over them because they had not yet tasted the sweetness of freedom

Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and George III may profit by their example. If that be treason, make the most of it.

France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.

Politics has been called the “art of the possible,” and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality.

While you are gazed at for your American-manufactured principles, and gazing at the folly and pageantry of animals in the shape of men cringing at the feet of an animal called a king, I shall be secluded from the noise and corruption of the times.

… let them who cry up the divine right of Kings consider, that the only form of government which had a proper claim to a divine establishment was so far from including the idea of a King, that it was a high crime for Israel to ask to be in this respect like other nations.

The political philosophy of black nationalism means: we must control the politics and the politicians of our community.