...these are princes which are cast in the
chaste princely mould, & they make me regret -- again -- that I am not
a prince myself. It isn't a new regret, but a very old one. I have never
been properly & humbly satisfied with my condition. I am a democrat
only on principle, not by instinct -- nobody is that. Doubtless some people
say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying. - Mark Twains Notebook #42 There never was a throne which did not represent a crime. - Mark Twain, a Biography The institution of royalty in any form is an insult to the human race. - Notebook, 1888 |
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Let us take the present male sovereigns of the earth -- and strip them naked.
Mix them with 500 naked mechanics, and then march the whole around a circus
ring, charging suitable admission of course -- and desire the audience to pick
out the sovereigns. They couldn't. You would have to paint them blue. You can't
tell a king from a copper except you differentiate their exteriority.
- Notebook, 1888
Why, dear me, any kind of royalty, howsoever modified, any kind of aristocracy,
howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under
that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don't
believe it when somebody else tells you.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and also so completely
stripped the divinity from royalty that, whereas crowned heads in Europe were
gods before, they are only men since, and can never be gods again, but only
figure-heads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions
as these compensate the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did,
and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to
liberty, humanity, and progress.
- Life on the Mississippi
I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that
a royal family of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as
any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues
and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other
royal cats, they would be laughable vain and absurd and never know it, they
would be wholly inexpensive, finally, they would have as sound a divine right
as any other royal house...The worship of royalty being founded in unreason,
these graceful and harmless cats would easily become as sacred as any other
royalties, and indeed more so, because it would presently be noticed that they
hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned nobody, inflicted no cruelties or
injustices of any sort, and so must be worthy of a deeper love and reverence
than the customary human king, and would certainly get it.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
This autobiography of mine is a mirror, and I am looking at myself in it all
the time. Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back--I get
glimpses of them in the mirror- and whenever they say or do anything that can
help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation, I set these
things down in my autobiography. I rejoice when a king or a duke comes my way
and makes himself useful to this autobiography, but they are rare customers,
with wide intervals between. I can use them with good effect as lighthouses
and monuments along my way, but for real business I depend upon the common herd.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
Unquestionably the person that can get lowest down in cringing before royalty
and nobility, and can get most satisfaction out of crawling on his belly before
them, is an American. Not all Americans, but when an American does it he makes
competition impossible.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
A Prince picks up grandeur, power, and a permanent holiday and gratis support
by a pure accident, the accident of birth, and he stands always before the grieved
eye of poverty and obscurity a monumental representative of luck. And then --
supremest value of all -- his is the only high fortune on the earth which is
secure. The commercial millionaire may become a beggar; the illustrious statesman
can make a vital mistake and be dropped and forgotten; the illustrious general
can lose a decisive battle and with it the consideration of men; but once a
Prince always a Prince -- that is to say, an imitation god, and neither hard
fortune nor an infamous character nor an addled brain nor the speech of an ass
can undeify him. By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most
valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.
It follows without doubt or question, then, that the most desirable position
possible is that of a Prince. And I think it also follows that the so-called
usurpations with which history is littered are the most excusable misdemeanors
which men have committed. To usurp a usurpation -- that is all it amounts to,
isn't it?
- "At the Shrine of St. Wagner"
A royal "right" stolen five hundred years ago is called a "divine"
right to-day. God himself is made a conspirator, an accessory to the theft.
- "Letters from a Dog to Another Dog Explaining and Accounting for Man"
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