Quotes About Aristocrats

Typhus was raging and even some at the Danish consulate were infected.... The pharmacies, running out of medicines, sold Orthodox amulets, and people were instructed to tie their sleeves tightly at the wrist so as to prevent lice from creeping in. Former ladies-in-waiting were sleeping on the floor, with eleven former aristocrats sharing one room. A feeling of doom was spreading all over the city, like typhus itself.

Aristocrats: n. fellows that wear downy hats and clean shirts - guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.

Our political system responds to large donors, so politicians create benefits for the rich, who then reward the politicians who created them. How different is this from the symbiosis in the Middle Ages between a king and the nobility, elevating aristocrats who repressed the peasantry at the same time that they hailed their own magnanimity and rolled their eyes at the peasants' morals?

At this point, a social flaw that always existed with regard to the [Roman] aristocrats in their townhouses became more evident. No longer finding urban life as secure and amenable as in the early empire, the landed rich gave primacy not to their urban mansions but to their country estates, making the latter their principal residences. The dominant forces in urban life increasingly became the bishops and cathedral clergy.