Quotes About Aristocracy

Assuming they're really Albert's sons, they're the present earl's first

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

The country that always modeled social mobility for the rest of the world has become more class-ridden than recent aristocracies like Austria and Japan.

You look very elegant today, my lord." "I'm wounded. I strive to look elegant every day." - Tyrion & Littlefinger

The aristocrats on both sides of the Atlantic, whether from new or old wealth, have the manners and the morals of small-town gossips. And

It is true that from time to time Jews suffered from the fury of an exploited peasantry or their competitors. But from time to time the aristocracy suffered the same fate. Thousands of French aristocrats were slaughtered during peasant uprisings or at the Great Terror of 1793. Many Russian aristocrats were killed or expelled during the October Revolution of 1917. Many of them were innocent, for class warfare can be as cruel as any war.

The funny thing about living at Longleat is that there's no 'typical' day, but I usually wake up around 6:45 A. M.

There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war for generations; even a Democrat like myself must admit this.

Where Sir Simon had got her with child.

The history of the fall of every nation is the history of the rise of the low-bred man and the fall of the gentleman.

The millions who watch 'Downton Abbey' do so neither relating to the Granthams nor hating them. It's an amused enjoyment of spectacle.

Whole sections had been taken over by the King's pack of semi-feral spaniels, who'd become inbred even by Royal standards and thus hare-brained even by Spaniel standards.

now Rothschild was providing Europe with a new social elite by   raising up the system of government bonds to supreme power . . . [and] endowing money with the former privileges of land. To be sure, he has thereby created a new aristocracy, but this is based on the most unreliable of elements, on money . . . [which] is more fluid than water and less steady than the air . . .32

as masters of the bond market, the Rothschilds were already more feared than loved. Reactionaries on the Right lamented the rise of a new form of wealth, higher-yielding and more liquid than the landed estates of Europe's aristocratic elites. As Heinrich Heine discerned, there was something profoundly revolutionary about the financial system the Rothschilds were creating:

Rothschild . . . destroyed the predominance of land, by raising the system of state bonds to supreme power, thereby mobilising property and income and at the same time endowing money with the previous privileges of the land. He thereby created a new aristocracy, it is true, but this, resting as it does on the most unreliable of elements, on money, can never play as enduringly regressive a role as the former aristocracy, which was rooted in the land, in the earth itself.

For a Monarchy readily becomes a Tyranny, an Aristocracy an Oligarchy, while a Democracy tends to degenerate into Anarchy.

for monarchy easily becomes tyranny, aristocracy easily becomes oligarchy, and democracy easily converts to anarchy. Thus anyone organizing a government according to one of the good forms does so for but a short time, because no precaution will prevent it from slipping into its opposite, so closely are the virtues and vices of the two related.

in the long run a ruler must avoid being hated by his people and must always put their interests before those of the aristocracy; the people are so many, Machiavelli reflected, that power ultimately lies with them.

Friedrich Nietzsche called the aristocratic predators who write society's laws "the splendid blond beast" precisely because they so often behave as though they are beyond the reach of elementary morality.

It was the "leisure-class" world, and the people in it were proud of the fact that they had never done and didn't know how to do anything useful. The farther back they could trace an ancestry which had never done it, the more distinguished they were.

The provincial dandy wore the longest of spurs and the fiercest of mustaches.

he, how many beds do you think this hall alone would hold? Monseigneur's dining-room? exclaimed

Mais soyons justes envers l'aristocratie. Elle a fait équilibre à la royauté; elle a été contrepoids. Elle a fait obstacle au despotisme; elle a été barrière. Remercions-la, et enterrons-la.

Might I make free with your lettuce, my lady?