Warrior Royals

Prince Henry of Wales won't be going to Iraq. Good reason to bring the rest of 'em home now, you'd think.













The government has other reasons. Why give him the celebrity treatment? I've never understood why, in 2007, the royals still train their children to be military warriors. Just imagine if Harry had spoken out against this immoral and illegal war. (As if...) The royals are too tied in with the Establishment, which has given Harry excuses before, when he's played soldier of a
different sort.

It is hard enough luck being a monarch, without being a target also.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927

There are shams and shams; there are frauds and frauds, but the transparentest of all is the sceptered one. We see monarchs meet and go through solemn ceremonies, farces, with straight countenances; but it is not possible to imagine them meeting in private and not laughing in each other's faces.
- Mark Twain's Notebook


I wish I might live fifty years longer; I believe I should see the thrones of Europe selling at auction for old iron. I believe I should really see the end of what is surely the grotesquest of all the swindles ever invented by man-- monarchy.
- [Mark Twain] Letter to Sylvester Baxter of Boston Herald, 1889



Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cow tail, could make a badge of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy.
- Mark Twain's Notebook




Monarchy has speech, and by it has been able to persuade man that it differs somehow from the rattlesnake, has something valuable about it somewhere, something worth preserving, something even good and high and fine, when properly "modified," something entitling it to protection from the club of the first comer who catches it out of its hole.
- Mark Twain - unpublished letter on the Czar, 1890