
“The King is only a slave like yourself, locked with heavier chains.”
"By This Axe I Rule!" (1967)
Letter to Charles Thomson, 11 July 1765; also quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). The last sentence is sometimes misquoted as "If we can get rid of the former, we can get rid of the latter".
Epistles
Context: Idleness and Pride Tax with a heavier Hand than Kings and Parliaments; If we can get rid of the former we may easily bear the Latter.
“The King is only a slave like yourself, locked with heavier chains.”
"By This Axe I Rule!" (1967)
" The Hand that Signed the Paper Felled a City http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=98", st. 1 (1936)
“I take pride as the king of illiterature.”
Very Ape.
Song lyrics, In Utero (1993)
“Idleness ere now has ruined both kings and wealthy cities.”
Otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes.
LI, last lines
Carmina
“Be diligent with your hands, for godliness does not lead to idleness.”
The Communistic Societies of the United States (1875)
"Short Memorials of some things to be cleared during my Command in the Army [1645 to 1650 A.D.]", in Stuart Tracts 1603–1693, ed. C. H. Frith, p. 353
"True Hallucinations" (1993)
Variant: Progress of human civilization in the area of defining human freedom is not made from the top down. No king, no parliament, no government ever extended to the people more rights than the people insisted upon.
Context: Progress of human civilization in the area of defining human freedom is not made from the top down. No king, no parliament, no government ever extended to the people more rights than the people insisted upon. And I think we've come to a place with this psychedelic issue. And we have the gay community as a model, and all the other communities, the ethnic communities. We simply have to say, Look: LSD has been around for fifty years now, we just celebrated the birthday. It ain't going away. WE are not going away. We are not slack-jawed, dazed, glazed, unemployable psychotic creeps. We are pillars of society. You can't run your computers, your fashion houses, your publishing houses, your damn magazines, you can't do anything in culture without psychedelic people in key positions. And this is the great unspoken truth of American Creativity. So I think it's basically time to just come out of the closet and go, "You know what, I'm stoned, and I'm proud."
2016, Interview with CNBC's John Harwood (August 22, 2016)