""Jane," I said quietly.
She opened her eyes, she had been far away in prayer.
"Yes, Mary? Forgive me, I was praying."
"If you go on flirting with the king with those sickly little smiles, one of us Boleyns is going to scratch your eyes out.""
— Philippa Gregory (The Other Boleyn Girl)

"Kings are the slaves of history."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal."
— Thomas Hardy (Under the Greenwood Tree)

"This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive."
— William Shakespeare (Henry V)

"I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too. "
— Queen Elizabeth I

"But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive."
— Shakespeare William

"All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they're a mighty ornery lot. It's the way they're raised."
— Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)