Quote by Michel de Montaigne: “Kings and philosophers defecate, and so do ladies.”

No matter how powerful or refined a person seems, they are still a body like everyone else. Montaigne uses this deliberately crude observation to puncture pretension — to remind us that beneath rank and status, we are all the same animal.

Montaigne wrote during the French Wars of Religion, when aristocratic and religious hierarchies claimed divine sanction for their power. His insistence on the bodily equality of all people was a quiet but pointed challenge to those hierarchies.

French Renaissance philosopher and writer credited with popularising the essay as a literary form. His three-volume Essais, first published in 1580, explored personal experience as a lens for universal human questions with remarkable candour and wit.