Quotes About Aristocracy

The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.

Who are the aristocrats now — who are chosen as the best to rule? Those who have money and the brains for money. It doesn't matter what else they have: but they must have money-brains — because they are ruling in the name of money." "The people elect the government," he said. "I know they do. But what are the people? Each one of them is a money-interest.

If the Reconstruction of the southern states, from slavery to free labor, and from aristocracy to industrial democracy, had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the effort, we should be living in a different world.

Conceiv'd out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism -personifying ill unparalleled ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation) -only one of the wolfish earls so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works -works in some respects greater than anything else ill recorded literature.

The ongoing hostilities involving the French and their shifting alliances with Italian city-states often resembled pageantry and processionals more than war. "A march through Italy was an occasion for feasts, spectacles, firework displays, jousts, the expropriation of estates, and occasional massacres," wrote Robert Payne. "The French aristocracy acquired new titles, new experiences, new mistresses, new diseases."1

For the fashionable gentlemen of the aristocracy, elegant eating and gambling clubs, such as White's and later Brookes's and Boodle's, were starting to spring up in St. James's. For the burgeoning new class of writers, journalists, professionals, and intellectuals whose company Franklin preferred, there were the coffeehouses.

Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it.

Aristocracy has three successive stages: the age of superiority, the age of privilege, and the age of vanity. Once through with the first, it degenerates into the second, and dies out in the third.

Down with tyranny!' Bramble cried. 'Aristocracy! Autocracy! Monocracy! Other ocracy things! You are outnumbered, sir! Surrender !

Down with tyranny!" Bramble cried. "Aristocracy! Autocracy! Monocracy! Other ocracy things! You are outnumbered, sir! Surrender!" Sucking

Lady Jane Gray, who tho' inferior to her lovely Cousin the Queen of Scots, was yet an amiable young woman & famous for reading Greek while other people were hunting....Whether she really understood that language or whether such a study proceeded only from an excess of vanity for which I beleive she was always rather remarkable, is uncertain.

He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion.

Ever since her being turned into a Churchill, she has out-Churchill'd them all in high and mighty claims.

A distinction to which they had been born gave no pride.

If I were as rich as Mr. Darcy, cried a young Lucas, who came with his sisters, I should not care how proud I was. I would keep a pack of foxhounds, and drink a bottle of wine a day.

Our aristocracy, unlike that of Europe, is open to all comers.

But, you know, we have these entrenched entities - and I'm talking about both Republicans and Democrats - who believe that when you're elected to office, you become some kind of member of the aristocracy, and that anyone who challenges you is attacking you and is unpatriotic. This is foolishness.

'Downton Abbey' about upper-class posh people: of course it is.

It is a know fact that almost all revolutions have been the work, not of the common people, but of the aristocracy, and especially of the decayed part of the aristocracy.

The House of Lords is like a glass of champagne that has stood for five days.

I do have strong feelings about the aristocracy: they serve a purpose, but it's a sort of insular strand of society.

One of the many curious aspects of American culture is the absence of an "upper" class, a "high" society, an hedonic aristocracy. America since Lincoln has been a heavy, feet-on-the-ground John Wayne society. The triumph of mediocrity and practicality.

It is not difficult to govern. All one has to do is not to offend the noble families.

To add to our misery and despair, a bloated aristocracy has sent to China - the greatest and oldest despotism in the world - for a cheap working slave.