logo

Quotes About Aristocracy

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class—whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
~ Frank Herbert
It's the weird thing Eton does - you're at school next to lords and earls and, in my case, Prince William, so you end up being used to dealing with those sorts of people.
~ Eddie Redmayne
I do think one success of Northern Europe, which the United States came from, was its willingness to accept innovation in business practices like Adam Smith and the whole Enlightenment. It essentially made the merchant class free instead of controlled by the king and aristocracy. That was essential.
~ James D. Watson
Silver and ermine and red faces full of port wine.
~ John Betjeman
You might consider letting us go and minding your own business...or else I shall be forced to stomp on your foot, sir. My lord, he corrected, sounding amused at her threat. Daniel, Lord Woodrow.
~ Lynsay Sands
which recall(s) a moment in time when raw excess made them a casual aristocracy, apart from the rest of the world.
~ Andrea Lee
It is surely not coincidental that all the earliest citations of the word bore in the Oxford English Dictionary—from the mid-eighteenth century—come from the correspondence of aristocrats and nobility.2 They did not have technology, but thanks to wealth and position they had a kind of easy everywhere of their own. The first people to be bored were the people who did not do manual work, who did not cook their own food, whose lives were served by others.
~ Andy Crouch
What Kate Bush is is simple: She is a classy and elegant Woman who offers us a chance to be more understanding of what might be happening in the mind of someone other than ourselves. Nurturing, insightful, graceful, and wise; you could do no better than listening to her perspective. If Modern Music has an aristocracy, Kate Bush is much more than The Queen. Kate Bush is the archetypal Mother.
~ Scott Heim
May I speak with his mother?" "Of course,follow me." The butler didn't go far,stopping at the door to the dining room to announce loftily, "Lady St. John has arrived, madam." Rebecca heard a testy tone, from inside the room. "Are you blind, Charles? I'm sitting right here." "The new Lady St. John.
~ Johanna Lindsey
Democracy... while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.
~ John Adams
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.
~ John Adams
The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power, is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor. Equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in every respect diabolical.
~ John Adams
You are afraid of the one–I, of the few. We agree perfectly that the many should have a full fair and perfect Representation.–You are Apprehensive of Monarchy; I, of Aristocracy. I would therefore have given more Power to the President and less to the Senate.
~ John Adams
This excessive love for "the balance of power" is neither more nor less than a gigantic system of out-door relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain.
~ John Bright
I have shown you how Machiavelli supplied the immoral theory needful for the consummation of royal absolutism; the absolute oligarchy of Venice required the same assurance against the revolt of conscience. It was provided by a writer as able as Machiavelli, who analyzed the wants and resources of aristocracy, and made known that its best security is poison.
~ John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton
Now a regular occurrence in the eighteenth century repeats itself: the aristocracy accepts the viewpoint and standards of value of the middle class; virtue becomes a fashion in the upper class.
~ Arnold Hauser
Aristocracy in general does not favour individualism; it bases its claim to privilege upon virtues which are common to the whole class or at least to whole clans.
~ Arnold Hauser
There are many reasons for the decline in royal esteem. One is that so many of the royals are thick.
~ Alastair Campbell
Army of soufflés at 'Downton'.
~ Roslyn Sulcas
The Duke of Devonshire owned Hardwick Hall, Chatsworth, Bolton Abbey, Lismore Castle and Compton Place, and, in London, Burlington and Devonshire Houses. Prodigal peers and their heirs ran up astronomical debts – and mortgaging and other legal devices allowed them to do this without imperilling their estates.
~ Roy Porter
The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving.
~ Russell Green
De Frontón: haber observado a qué grado de envidia, de disimulo y duplicidad llegaron los tiranos, y cómo, casi siempre, esas gentes que llamamos los «patricios» son incapaces de verdadero afecto para los demás.
~ Marcus Aurelius
The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
Between 1875 and 1905 over forty American girls married into the peerage, bringing with them the dollars that saved many a stately home from ruin. There were many attempts to calculate the total amount of American dollars spent in dowry payments; one estimate said that American brides had brought in $50 million to Britain, but the probability is that it was nearer a billion dollars – money that went straight into the pockets of the men they married.
~ Anne de Courcy