Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A Republic i...s a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, Royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thank God I'm over the hill. The only heat I have left comes from hot flashes, my promiscuity is confined to the words "one size f...its all," and I buy my white cotton unmentionables at Boadicea's Retreat, not Victoria's Secret. None of the things men do to women could possibly happen to me now unless the U.S. is invaded by one of those new Russian republics whose soldiers aren't fussy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many have dreamed up republics and principalities that have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should li...ve and how one does live is so wide that that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Republics demanded virtue. Monarchies could rely on coercion and "dazzling splendor" to suppress self-interest or factions; republ...ics relied on the goodness of the people to put aside private interest for public good. The imperatives of virtue attached all sorts of desiderata to the republican citizen: simplicity, frugality, sobriety, simple manners, Christian benevolence, duty to the polity. Republics called on other virtues--spiritedness, courage--to protect the polity from external threats. Tyrants kept standing armies; republics relied on free yeomen, defending their own land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their com...plaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Things happen to us, all the time. It was like that for a century, and it is again. It's not like here: People always do things, b...ecause you are born with it; you are brought up in this spirit, the active approach to life: "Stand up and go." We were not. We were always passive in our lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »