The Monarchy Quotes

“As long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffuse feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

“Only servility requires the realm of illusion.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

“Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

“The prerogative of the Crown; the enthronement of 'The Crown in Parliament', is the special and particular symbol of our status as subjects instead of citizens. It is a rubbing in of the fact that we have no rights, properly understood, but rather traditions that depend on the caprice of a political compromise made in 1688.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

“The tribe that confuses its totems and symbols with reality has succumbed to fetishism and may be in more trouble than it realises.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

“Humans should not worship other humans at all, but if they must do so it is better that the worshipped ones do not occupy any positions of political power.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

“Without Oliver Cromwell there might well have not been a Parliament to which Our Sovereign Lady might make her gracious address.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

“As long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffuse feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding. A secret prerogative is an anomaly – perhaps the greatest of anomalies. That secrecy is, however, essential to the utility of English royalty as it now is. Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it. When there is a select committee on the Queen, the charm of royalty will be gone. Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish