Quotes About Aristocracy

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.

The good thing about the aristocracy – German or English – was that they were easily traced, Mirabelle thought.

It is hardly surprising that working class movements in many countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found a memorable precedent, and some winning rhetoric, in the ancient story of how the concerted action of the Roman people wrung concessions from the hereditary patrician aristocracy and secured full political rights for the plebeians. Nor is it surprising that early trades unions could look to the plebeian walkouts as a model for a successful strike.

Two hundred years later there was little to patrician privilege beyond the right to hold a few ancient priesthoods and to wear a particular form of fancy footwear.

Yes, royals know how to do things beyond counting our twelve toes.

Groothertog Fabrizio heeft een leuke nieuwe reden om me te haten. - Luciano

told me, a lord, no less.

Given that most actual voters were sunk in debt, working multiple jobs, uninsured, saddled with ruined credit scores, and often battling alcohol and opiate addiction and other problems, it was a horrific aristocratic insult to tell people each election cycle that what really mattered to them was what candidate looked most convincing carrying a rifle on a duck hunt.

One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class

Aristocracies, those children of the established fact, are for epochs of concentration. In epochs of expansion, epochs such as that in which we now live, epochs when always the warning voice is again heard: Now is the judgment of this world , -- in such epochs aristocracies with their natural clinging to the established fact, their want of sense for the flux of things, for the inevitable transitoriness of all human institutions, are bewildered and helpless.

It is the privilege of nobility to condescend.

The intellect, like all cultural values, has created an aristocracy based on the possession of rational culture and independent of all personal ethical qualities of man. The aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy.

Before her, with sharp blue eyes and perfectly coiffed blond hair, was Josephine Marie Elizabeth Cavendish, Her Grace, the Duchess of Durham, widow of the fifth duke, and aunt to the Cavendish siblings. One did not call her Josie. Amelia had asked.

Though this gives a fleeting impression of them all being connected by wireless to the great mother ship of French aristocracy in the sky, the "antennae" are in fact meant to keep the park birds from landing and covering their regal heads in unsightly droppings.

The wealthy and powerful have rigged the system to perpetuate their privilege; the professional classes have figured out how to pass their advantages on to their children, converting the meritocracy into a hereditary aristocracy; colleges that claim to select students on merit give an edge to the sons and daughters of the wealthy and the well-connected. According to this complaint, meritocracy is a myth, a distant promise yet to be redeemed.14

22Fidalgo derives from filho d'algo—literally, the "son of somebody"—though it later became a generic term for nobility.

The great honor of Christianity, its incontestable merit, and the whole secret of its unprecedented and yet thoroughly legitimate triumph, lay in the fact that it appealed to that suffering and immense public to which the ancient world, a strict and cruel intellectual and political aristocracy, denied even the simplest rights of humanity.

As early as 1808, John Adams said, with a surprisingly modern accent, "We have one material which actually constitutes an aristocracy that governs the nation. That material is wealth. Talents, birth, virtues, services, sacrifices, are of little consideration with us.

What, after all, was the point of describing a Revolution meant to create a democratic republic of free men that was destroyed by power-hungry men determined to create a new 'aristocracy?

Aristocracy is the spirit of the Old Testament, democracy of the New.

If a lord was frightening, a noble lady was terrifying.

To be an aristocrat is to not believe that everything depends on the will.

The most precise and shortest definition of a true civilization has been given by Trevelyan: A leisured class with large and learned libraries in their country seats.

An aristocratic society is one where the desire for personal perfection is the animating spirit of the social institutions.