Quotes About Aristocracy

Originally, anti-Americanism was an ideological value supported by educational elites and the aristocracy, while less well-to-do and underprivileged Europeans demonstrated sympathy for America by emigrating there.

We were descended from royalty.

The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.

The aristocracy of Western Europe has absolutely tabooed silver in those countries and driven it away from there. Here it finds its only resting place.

There was a moment when designers draped in ermine would be reading Proust, or pretending to.

I'd love to have a 19th Century Russian book club where all the members had to act like the pretentious minor noblemen they were reading about.

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

Described by his biographer as an "overweight, rheumatic, vain, pompous, gluttonous inebriate," he had run through several fortunes totaling almost £100,000 with his spendthrift ways and aristocratic pretensions, including expenditures for a heavily mortgaged, thousand-acre New Jersey estate with piazzas, a deer park, painted drawing rooms, a wardrobe holding thirty-one coats and fifty-eight vests, and carriages embossed with the coat of arms he claimed as his patrimony.

A self-perpetuating aristocracy easily hardens into an oligarchy, and therefore a senate, for example, should be replenished from the ranks of the people.

For idleness is an appendix to nobility.

ìIdleness is an appendix to nobilityî

Courts are, unquestionably, the seats of politeness and good breeding; were they not so, they would be the seats of slaughter and desolation. Those who now smile upon and embrace, would affront and stab, each other, if manners did not interpose.... LORD CHESTERFIELD, 1694-1773

His mother made a noise that in anyone of lower rank than a countess would have been given the unmannerly name of snort. As a cowed member of the ton had once commented, 'Nobody harrumphs quite like the Marchioness of Uppington.

He admired her for throwing off her aristocratic shackles -- his terms, that -- and making her own way in the world. He didn't realize that the truth was so much more complex, so much less impressive. She had less thrown than been thrown.

Even Sally wound't want to cross fans with the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale. The woman had a tongue of steel and drank the blood of young virgins for breakfast.

There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes.

Holmes was expressing his deepest values, ones impressed on him from an early age. He had been raised to believe he and his peers were part of a hereditary aristocracy. He had learned from his father that they were part of a special caste whose refined physiognomy set them apart, and whose elevated intellect was "congenital and hereditary.

It goes Prince, Duke, Marquis, Earl, Viscount, Baron, Baronet.

The inimitable stories of Tong-King never have any real ending, and this one, being in his most elevated style, has even less end than most of them. But the whole narrative is permeated with the odour of joss-sticks and honourable high-mindedness, and the two characters are both of noble birth.

Eighth Earl of Spencer

Among Berthier's many qualities was a diplomatic nature so finely attuned that he somehow managed to persuade his wife, the Duchess Maria of Bavaria, to share a chateau with his mistress Madame Visconti (and vice versa).

The Victorian English aristocracy was a distinct tribe, with its own hierarchies, accents, clubs, schools, colleges, career-paths, vocabulary, honour-codes, love-rituals, loyalties, traditions, sports and sense of humour. Some of these were quite intricate and almost impenetrable to outsiders.

The interpretation Churchill gave to the obligations of aristocracy was that he and his class had a profound responsibility towards his country, which had the right to expect his lifelong service to it.

Drinking standing up, in a rush and without due reverence, does not become the nobility.