"Divine right of kings" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... right to assemble whenever and wherever they please." "A general rising of a nation does not deserve the name of a revolt. It is the people for whom and by whom the Sovereign is established, who have the sole power of judging whether he does, or does not, fulfil his duties." In the days of "the Divine Right of Kings" such sentiments could easily be charged ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... Ferdinand von Stroebel. The Archduke's son and I were school-fellows and playmates; you remember as well as I my father's place near the royal lands. The Archduke talked much of democracy and the New World, and used to joke about the divine right of kings. Let me make my story short—I found out their plan of flight and slipped away with them. It was believed that I had been carried away ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... When William I. snatched his crown from the altar, as Charlemagne might have done, and clapped it on his head, repeating formulas suited to Philip II. and Charles V., the minister was silent and submitted to these blasphemies, derived from the ancient doctrine of the divine right of kings, because they increased his own ministerial power, exercised under a presidency and governorship chiefly nominal and honorary. But a thinker of his force, a statesman of his science, a man of his greatness, should have remembered what ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Thersites seems drawn with special spite and venom, as a satire upon the first critics that rose up among the assembled people to question the divine right of kings to do wrong. We may be sure the real Thersites, from whom the poet drew his picture, was a very different and a far more serious power in debate than the misshapen buffoon of the Iliad. But the king who had been thwarted ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... men of 1776 rebelled against a government which did not claim to be of the people, but on the contrary upheld the "divine right of kings;" and whereas, The women of this nation today, under a government which claims to be based upon individual rights, in an infinitely greater degree are suffering all the wrongs which led to the war of the Revolution; and whereas, the oppression is all the more keenly felt because our masters, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... been governor of Massachusetts ten years. He was a gentleman of many good qualities, an excellent scholar, and a friend to learning. But he was naturally of an arbitrary disposition; and he had been bred at the University of Oxford, where young men were taught that the divine right of kings was the only thing to be regarded in matters of government. Such ideas were ill adapted to please the people of Massachusetts. They rejoiced to get rid of Sir Francis Bernard, but liked his successor, Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson, ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... reject the sacrilegious assertion that the power of the Habsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties is of divine origin. We refuse to recognise the divine right of kings. Our nation elected the Habsburgs to the throne of Bohemia of its own free will and by the same right deposes them. We hereby declare the Habsburg dynasty unworthy of leading our nation and deny all their claims to rule in the Czecho-Slovak land, which we here and now declare ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... ends, through experts, not depending on the forces of society or the wishes of men uninformed upon complex problems of international policy, military administration, economy and law. And they adopted from Luther his new and admired dogma of the divine right of kings. They consistently rejected an opposite theory, well known to James from his teacher Buchanan, derived from Knox and his medieval masters, and wrongly imputed to Calvin—the theory of revolution. They had the judges with them, that is, the laws ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... there be such a thing as a religious war? There can be wars in the interest of different theologies, and mixed wars of diplomacy and confessions of belief, wars to transfer the tradition of infallibility from a pope to a book, wars of Puritans against the divine right of kings in the Old World and the natural rights of Indians in the New, in all of which the name of God has been invoked for sanction, and Scripture has been quoted, and Psalms uplifted on the battle-field for encouragement. And it is true that every conflict, in which there ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... upon it was that of the Abbe Richard who criticized it from point of view of the divine right of kings in his long and tiresome work entitled La Defense de la religion, de la morale, de la vertu, de la politique et de la societe, dans la refutation des ouvrages qui ont pour titre, l'un Systeme Social etc. Vautre La Politique Naturelle par le R. P. Ch. L. Richard, ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... list of the greatest captains of industry, as they come to your mind. How many of the men who are really directing the country's business gained their position through inherited wealth? You will find them astonishingly few. There is no "divine right of kings" in business. In fact, statistics show us that the very things which most people think of as advantages, namely, wealth and "not having to work" are really ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson
... Southern was one which favoured the enslavement of man by man "apart from colour." A definite choice had to be made between the principle of the fathers, which asserted certain rights for all men, and that other principle against which the fathers had rebelled and of which the "divine right of kings" furnished Lincoln with his example. In what particular manner the white people would be made to feel the principle of tyranny when they had definitely "denied freedom to others" and ceased to "deserve it for themselves" Lincoln did not attempt ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... rest of us. There is no "sacred privilege that doth hedge about a king" in the British Empire, and King George is respected among us for his manliness, and we cheered him sincerely when he twice visited us in the trenches, for we do not believe to-day in the divine right of kings, neither do we believe in ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... the Second King's palace on the pretext of arranging certain "family affairs" intrusted to him by his late brother, but in reality to acquaint himself with the charms of several female members of the prince's household; and, scandalous as it should have seemed even to Siamese notions of the divine right of kings, the most attractive and accomplished of those women were quietly transferred to his own harem. For some time I heard nothing more of the Princess of Chiengmai; but it was curious, even amusing, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... sometimes appear to you, Miss Barton, more distorted and unreal than a dream? I know it does to me. The spectacle we have just witnessed was a part of the ages that believed in the godhead of Christ and the divine right of Kings; but it seems to me strange that such barbarities should be permitted ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... a peasant is killed? Whence comes this great difference among equal Christians? Simply from human laws and inventions." (p. 96 ff.) This citation deserves to be specially pondered in view of the Catholic charge that Luther was a defender of absolutism, the divine right of kings. If Rome's attitude to kingcraft be studied, it will be found that Rome has been the supporter of the most tyrannous rulers. It is well, too, to remember Rome's claim of a "divine right" of priests. Special laws of exemption and immunity, ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... in many particulars and forming separate varieties, yet assimilate as a whole, so nations migrating to the spirit world form separate nationalities. And, as I have stated, some of them, educated in the belief of the divine right of kings, choose a form of rule nearer approaching the monarchial than the republican. Among such often arises a Napoleon, a man of powerful intellect, a mind to grasp all circumstances, and a will to direct, who succeeds ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... our government's leadership and controlling influence are recognized and acknowledged by all the world, these conditions do not obtain. Here the divine right of kings has never been recognized. We have not only disclaimed the right of conquest ourselves, but we have refused to recognize it in others. We have not only refused to recognize this right in the strong nation, but we have protected the weak nation against it. Moreover ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... he and the Gallic writers agreed upon certain fundamental propositions; but they were peculiar neither to him nor them. Some of the same principles were announced by Locke and Beccaria, by Hobbes, who maintained the omnipotence of the state, and by Grotius, who insisted upon the divine right of kings. To agree with another upon certain matters does not make one his disciple. No one mistakes the doctrines of Paul for those of Mohammed, because both taught the immortality of the soul. To confound Jefferson with Rousseau or Condorcet is about as reasonable as to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... hardly be correct to cast the blame of their less laudable doings on the writings they invoked, since their opponents made use of the same writings for different ends, finding there a strong warrant for the divine right of kings and the denunciation of those who, like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, took on themselves the office of the priesthood which belonged of right solely to Aaron and his sons, or, in other words, to men ordained by ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... secret of the whole business—that Monarchy naturally tends to despotism; so that the complication of the British Constitution is a virtue only because its basic principle is false and vicious. If Americans still accept the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, well and good; if not, then in Heaven's name let them cease to bow down in abject ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... will long be remembered for the blows bestowed upon the divine right of kings, and the privileges which the sovereigns were compelled to concede to the people. The Emperor Ferdinand of Austria was expelled from his capital, and the King of Prussia was subjected to humiliation by his own people. France proclaimed the republic, and Nicholas proclaimed himself ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... the crown in the gift of the people. But it neither introduced nor determined any important principle, and, that both parties might be able to work together, it left untouched the fundamental question between Whig and Tory. For the divine right of kings it established, in the words of Defoe, the divine right of freeholders; and their domination extended for seventy years, under the authority of John Locke, the philosopher of government by the gentry. Even Hume did not enlarge ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... there is such a thing as divine right of kings is not settled in this book. It was found too difficult. That the executive head of a nation should be a person of lofty character and extraordinary ability, was manifest and indisputable; that none but the Deity could select ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... these thoughts that they create new epochs in history. Through Luther the thought of liberty in church and state set tyrants trembling and thrones tottering. Through Cromwell the thought of personal rights became a weapon powerful enough utterly to destroy that citadel of iniquity named the divine right of kings. It was a great moral thought called the "Golden Rule" that shotted the cannon of the North for victory and spiked the cannon of the South for defeat. Measureless is the might of a moral idea. It exceeds the force of earthquakes and the might of tidal waves. The reason why no scholar or historian ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... discipline in their dioceses. Besides, all religious orders were now united by the necessity of opposing a common front to the attacks of the Protestants, and they felt that the fate of the religion was intimately bound up with that of the dynasty. The principle of the Divine right of Kings was opposed to the doctrine of the right of the people to choose their monarch propounded by the Monarchomaques, and Roman Catholics were, by then, attached to the monarchy just as Calvinists were attached to the Republic. The experiences of the last century prevented any return to the ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... Cromwellian system and the republicanism which Harrington and Milton had based upon it. He was content to have a kingship divested of legislative power so long as hereditary succession was acknowledged to be dependent upon popular consent. The main thing was to be rid of the Divine Right of kings. ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... asking the advice of any one except his immediate counselors. In general, the rulers on the continent exercised despotic powers, and James I of England and his son Charles I would gladly have made themselves absolute rulers, for they entertained the same exalted notions of the divine right of kings which prevailed across the English Channel. England finally succeeded, however, in adjusting the relations between king and Parliament in a very happy way, so as to produce a limited, or constitutional, monarchy. The long and bitter struggle between the house of Stuart and the English ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... a man with shining eyes who talked of the sinful folly of war, of the wanton waste of armies; who dreamed of universal brotherhood, and a world governed by love! Wild words, foolish dreams, perhaps—and yet most dangerous to the idea of the divine right of Kings! So, that evening, the Prince sat and ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... happened that engrossed the attention of the younger members of the family. There had been a disturbance in Paris; the old Bonaparte faction coming to the fore, and Louis Philippe had fled from the throne to England. Napoleon Bonaparte had shattered the divine right of kings nearly forty years earlier. ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... and Prussia formed themselves into a league for the preservation of what they were pleased to call "The Divine Right of Kings." It was the attack upon this sacred principle, which was the germ of all this mischievous talk about freedom. They called their league "The Holy Alliance," and what they proposed to do was to stamp out free ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... arms. The monocle was a British institution, and he would as soon have denied the divine right of kings as question an Englishman's right to wear what he pleased ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... this time, the Divine Right of Kings, and the Inheritances of Princes in the Moon, met with a terrible Shock, and that by the Solunarian Party themselves; and insomuch that even my Philosopher, and he was none of the Jure Divino Men, ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... remaining 95,000 who contributed their wealth and industry to the prosperity of the city.[5] The theory of the State rests upon no abstract principle like that of the divine right of the Empire, which determined Dante's speculation in the Middle Ages, or that of the divine right of kings, with which we Englishmen were made familiar in the seventeenth century, or that again of the rights of men, on which the democracies of France and America were founded. The right contemplated by the Italian politicians is that of the burghers to rule the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... few years' time, he quietly returned to Starkey Manor-House—some of his Lancashire neighbours having lent their good offices to reconcile him to the powers that were. He was as firm a Roman Catholic as ever, and as staunch an advocate for the Stuarts and the divine right of kings; but his religion almost amounted to asceticism, and the conduct of those with whom he had been brought in such close contact at St. Germains would little bear the inspection of a stern moralist. So he gave his allegiance where he could not give his esteem, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... and princes, and there boldly denounced vice and misrule. It was not difficult for a Chinese scholar and teacher to find access to the highest of the land. The Chinese believed in the divine right of learning, just as they believed in the divine right of kings. Mang employed every weapon of persuasion in trying to combat heresy and oppression; alternately ridiculing and reproving: now appealing in a burst of moral enthusiasm, and now denouncing in terms of ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... that most of the progress toward individual liberty in English history was made through the successful struggle of the lawyers against the assertion of the divine right of Kings and through the defence of privilege by members of our profession. Lawyers like Lord Coke and Lord Hale stand out in the profession for their maintenance of the independence of the judiciary and their support ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... enough, Shakespeare supposes him an over-confident believer in that divine right of kings, of which people in Shakespeare's time were coming to hear so much; a general right, sealed to him (so Richard is made to think) as an ineradicable personal gift by the touch—stream rather, over head and breast and shoulders—of the ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... presumably had the kingdom of heaven within him as much as any disciple, had his place in the scheme of things. Indeed the apostles made this an excuse for carrying subservience to the State to a pitch of idolatry that ended in the theory of the divine right of kings, and provoked men to cut kings' heads off to restore some sense of proportion in the matter. Jesus certainly did not consider the overthrow of the Roman empire or the substitution of a new ecclesiastical ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... truth. I am not speaking of the Anglican Church with any disdain, though to them I seem contemptuous. To them of course it is "Aut Caesar aut nullus," but not to me. It may be a great creation, though it be not divine, and this is how I judge of it. Men, who abjure the divine right of kings, would be very indignant, if on that account they were considered disloyal. And so I recognize in the Anglican Church a time-honoured institution, of noble historical memories, a monument of ancient wisdom, a momentous arm of political strength, a great national organ, a source ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... when a child is born unto a man that man unconsciously puts on the purple. He becomes the ruler and sits on the throne of authority. He even seeks to cloak his weaknesses and his mistakes in that threadbare old fabrication about the divine right of kings. But I can see that he is often wrong, and even my Dinkie can see that he is not always right in his decrees. More and more often, of late, I've observed the boy studying his father, studying him with an impersonal and critical eye. And this habit of silent appraisal ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... very natural, simply because the superior class who monopolized the good things of earth were obliged, in order to enslave and tax men, to make them believe that their power was derived from God. And thus was taught the "divine right of kings," the duty of submission, the necessity of belief and the sinfulness of doubt. The source of all knowledge was declared to be a book, and the right of interpretation of this book was given to one class alone—those who sided with and were a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... and Milton, no new hand at a pamphlet, set to work. In March, 1651, his first Defence of the English People was in print. In this great pamphlet Milton asserts, as against the doctrine of the divine right of kings, the undisputed sovereignty of the people; and he maintains the proposition that, as well by the law of God, as by the law of nations, and the law of England, a king of England may be brought to trial and death, the people being discharged from all obligations ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... a free hand. As it is now, we have three different people to deceive: this Cabinet of shopkeepers, which seems easy enough; Father Paul and his fanatics of the Church party; and this apostle of the divine right of kings, Kalonay. And he and the good father are ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... suppose that they do not take truth on any one's authority; they prove it. In business they do not accept methods on authority; they work them out. In statesmanship they no longer believe in the divine right of kings nor do they accept infallible dicta handed down from above. But they think that religion is delivered to them by authority and that they believe what they do believe because a divine Church or a divine Book or ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Government of England once decreed "that every clergyman, four times in the year, should instruct his parishioners in the Divine right of Kings, and the damnable sin of resistance."[75] No Higher Law! America has ministers who need no act of Parliament to teach them to do the same; they run before ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... and with him public affairs, received such prominence in the omen texts. As the nation's ruler he was not only an important personage by virtue of his power over his subjects, but also by virtue of his close relationship to the gods. The theory of the 'divine right of kings' was rigidly adhered to in Babylonia and Assyria. When the monarchs speak of themselves as nominated by this or that god to be the ruler of the country, this was not a mere phrase. The king was the vicar ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... around for a man who would serve him as a tool to hold the country. Such a man he found in Ferdinand Joseph Maximilian, the brother of the emperor of Austria, a dreamer rather than a man of action, and a fervent believer in the "divine right of kings." This was the kind of man that the French usurper was in want of, and he offered him the position of emperor of Mexico. Maximilian was taken by surprise. The proposition was a startling one. But in the end ambition overcame judgment, and he accepted the lofty but perilous position ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... the institution of a recall for the angel Gabriel, and a referendum for the Day of Judgment, was undreamed of. The chiefs of the clans, the chiefs of the tribes, the kings of the Germans, and finally the emperors were all elective. The divine right of kings is a purely modern development. The descendants of these German tribes in England, elected their king in the days of William the Conqueror even, and as late as 1689 the Commons of England voted that King James had abdicated, and ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... sir, serve the Stuarts. How came the house of Hanover upon the throne? You see, sir, that if you zealous loyalists could shift off James, we, with less belief in the divine right of kings, can shift off George. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce
... more loyal people! If we had a slender-limbed Stuart who insisted upon travelling with his temporary favourite when the lives and livelihoods of the best blood of Britain were being staked for his throne whilst he amused himself, I suppose we should wear white favours, and believe in the divine right of Kings. It must be impossible for her to forget that the Prince, whom death has proved to be worthy of the praise most people now accord him, was far from popular in his lifetime, and the pet gibe and sport of Punch. I suppose when she ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... unbroken line altogether to the doctrine of hereditary genius. Much lies in the fact that upon each of these rulers in turn, depended the maintenance and success of his empire. The Moguls were real powers, indeed the only powers, and not only reigned but governed. Had the doctrine of the divine right of kings been overthrown in India during the reign of even the ablest of the six, and the heir to the throne been debarred the exercise of power; taught from his infancy that his role was to be wholly ornamental, a sham king whose chief end and use was the opening of ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... self-respect which animated his Puritan forefathers. One question, and only one question, he frequently tells us, is of real importance. All the rest is mere verbiage. The single dogma worth attacking or defending is the divine right of kings. Are men, in the old phrase, born saddled and bridled, and other men ready booted and spurred, or are they not? That is the single shibboleth which distinguishes true men from false. Others, he says, bowed their heads to the image of the beast. 'I spit upon ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen |
