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There are shams and shams; there are frauds and frauds, but the transparentest
of all is the sceptered one. We see monarchs meet and go through solemn
ceremonies, farces, with straight countenances; but it is not possible
to imagine them meeting in private and not laughing in each other's faces. I wish I might live fifty years longer; I believe I should see the thrones
of Europe selling at auction for old iron. I believe I should really see
the end of what is surely the grotesquest of all the swindles ever invented
by man-- monarchy. |
 Illustration by "Dwig" from the Dave Thomson collection |
We hold these truths to be self-evident -- that all monarchs are usurpers and
descendants of usurpers; for the reason that no throne was ever set up in this
world by the will, freely exercised, of the only body possessing the legitimate
right to set it up -- the numerical mass of the nation.
- Letter to Sylvester Baxter of Boston Herald, 1889
It is hard enough luck being a monarch, without being a target also.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
Monarchy has speech, and by it has been able to persuade man that it differs
somehow from the rattlesnake, has something valuable about it somewhere, something
worth preserving, something even good and high and fine, when properly "modified,"
something entitling it to protection from the club of the first comer who catches
it out of its hole.
- An unpublished letter on the Czar, 1890
Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But
the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cow tail, could make a badge
of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
The first gospel of all monarchies should be rebellion; the second should be
Rebellion; and the third and all gospels and the only gospel in any monarchy
should be Rebellion against Church and State.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
A select and peculiar kind of slave-proprietor who does not get his property
by purchase, or trick, or beguilement, but inherits it -- from an ancestor who
stole it.
- "Letters from a Dog to Another Dog Explaining and Accounting for Man"
"A
Yankee in King Edward's Court" or
"Europe at the Throne of Twain"
"Dwig" cartoon from SUCCESS MAGAZINE, September 1907
Original cartoon owned by the Mark Twain Museum, Hannibal, MO.
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