Mary Renault Quotes

If a great multitude of men should call one of their number King, unless this instituted Prince, appear in greater visible splendor then others, can reward those that obey and please him, and do the contrary to others; his Institution signifies little, even although he chance to have greater corporal or mental faculties, than any other of the number

Whoever desired to enjoy money, lands, or even life itself, was under the necessity of obeying the kings nod in all things. Alas! How much it is to be lamented that any man, who is but a worm and dust, should … arrive at such a height of pride as to trample on all the rest of mankind.

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.

The silence of peoples is something kings should study.

No true and perfect human society can be conceived which is not governed by some supreme authority…. Do the sheep when they are all assembled together rule and guide the shepherd?

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four.

You have power, rank, command, influence; we have wealth, the source both of our strength and weakness.

It is an old prerogative of kings to govern everything but their passions.

Let this stand then as a settled maxim of the law of nature, never to be shaken by any artifices of flatterers, that the senate, or the people, are superior to kings, be they good or bad: which is but what you yourself do in effect confess when you tell us that the authority of kings was derived from the people. For that power which they transferred to princes doth yet naturally, or, as I may say, virtually, reside in themselves notwithstanding.

You don’t need to admire power, but you must always, however grudgingly, respect and understand it.

Only powerful people have liberty.

The central factor in most human beings is power. Politics is the manifestation of the quest for power.

How many, even of the better sort, would choose to be slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and tyrannical rule over all below them?

In any court-like environment of power, you will inevitably find people who are drawn to those who are successful or powerful, not out of admiration, but out of secret envy.

When young women get called bossy, it's often because they're trying to exercise power without status. It's not a problem that they're being dominant; the backlash arises because they're overstepping their status.

Authority is a solvent of humanity: look at any husband, any father of a family,and note the absorption of the person by the persona, the individual by the role. Then multiply the family, and the authority, by some hundreds and see the effect upon a sea-captain, to say nothing of an absolute monarch.Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; unless it so happens that he is immune to the poison.

If you get to thinking you're a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else's dog around.

Who asks a king for a penny?

Tis so much to be a king, that he only is so by being so.

What identifies an individual as a king is how other people behave towards him. All authority is assumed, and if other people don't accept your authority then you don't have it. Perhaps the critical thing to being a convincing figure of authority is actually not to try too hard.

The greatest slave in a kingdom is generally the king of it.

I fluffed off the guy who kept requesting tunes all night, then found out he was the King's son.

A king is always a king - and a woman always a woman: his authority and her sex ever stand between them and rational converse

If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?" "Hah!" went Tenar; and presently, with some cunning, she said, "Haven't there been queens? Weren't they women of power?" "A queen's only a she-king," said Ged. She snorted. "I mean, men give her power. They let her use their power. But it isn't hers, is it? It isn't because she's a woman that she's powerful, but despite it.