2,112 Quotes About Kings

Kings also sleep; but the clever ones, with one eye open, just like dolphins and whales.

In its essence, Martin Luther King Jr.'s ‘I Have a Dream' speech is one citizen's soul-searing plea with his countrymen––Whites and Blacks––to recognize that racial disparities fueled by unwarranted bigotry were crippling America's ability to shine as a true beacon of democracy in a world filled with people groping their way through suffocating shadows of political turmoil, economic oppression, military mayhem, starvation, and disease.

A people may let a king fall, yet still remain a people, but if a king let his people slip from him, he is no longer a king.

Also, I'd like to play an athlete again, while I'm still physically fit, or a musician, like Nat King Cole, because I play the trumpet and sing. I'd like to incorporate that into a character.

I could do what a lot of people are doing and that's sign the best Nicaraguan fighters and then sell them to Don King, but there's no way I'll do that.

. .we would have to say that hereditary succession is harmful. You may say the king, having sovereign power, will not in that case hand over to his children. But it is hard to believe that: it is a difficult achievement, which expects too much virtue of human nature.

Even if you must have regard to wealth, in order to secure leisure, yet it is surely a bad thing that the greatest offices, such as those of kings and generals, should be bought. The law which allows this abuse makes wealth of more account than virtue, and the whole state becomes avaricious.

A king ruleth as he ought, a tyrant as he lists, a king to the profit of all, a tyrant only to please a few.

Just as a royal rule, if not a mere name, must exist by virtue of some great personal superiority in the king, so tyranny, which is the worst of governments, is necessarily the farthest removed from a well-constituted form; oligarchy is little better, for it is a long way from aristocracy, and democracy is the most tolerable of the three.