Top 100 Quotes About Aristocracy
#1. Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested.
Hervey Allen
#2. 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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#3. An organized effort is making to deceive the people. There are two great enemies of thought and progress, the aristocracy of royalty and the aristocracy of gold.
Mary Elizabeth Lease
#4. Thus our democracy was from an early period the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#6. Every age that has historical status is governed by aristocracies.Aristocracy with the meaning - the best are ruling.Peoples do never govern themselves. That lunacy was concocted by liberalism. Behind its people's sovereignty the slyest cheaters are hiding, who don't want to be recognized.
Joseph Goebbels
#7. A mercantile democracy may govern long and widely; a mercantile aristocracy cannot stand.
Walter Savage Landor
#8. This old aristocracy and Church-ridden, and tradition-ridden country will never grow wiser. Whilst we are fighting for supremacy in Europe the [United] States are working , and not fighting for it, but winning it all over the world.
John Bright
#9. Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was assassinated.
Michael Parenti
#10. Intellect, without heart, is infinitely cruel ... So that, after all, the real aristocracy must be that of goodness where the intellect is directed by the heart.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#11. I mean, already in the French Revolution, the harpsichord becomes identified with the aristocracy, with the ancien regime. Plus, hey, you know, I mean, harpsichord is a really easy target, isn't it? I mean, it's - it's just how it is.
Mahan Esfahani
#12. Here in England the welfare of the State depends on the conduct of our aristocracy.
Anthony Trollope
#13. Anyone who lives like a modern aristocracy, the last thing they exhibit is a sense of gratitude. Me, I'm very fortunate.
James Ransone
#14. I don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.
Caitlin Moran
#15. I considered 4 of these bills [of the revised code of Virginia] as forming a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of antient or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican.
Thomas Jefferson
#16. The greatest characters the world has known, have rose on the democratic floor. Aristocracy has not been able to keep a proportionate pace with democracy.
Thomas Paine
#17. Not to mention the fact that seppuku is the aristocracy of suicide. And I'm not saying that just because my parents called me Mishima.
Jean Teule
#18. Down with tyranny!' Bramble cried. 'Aristocracy! Autocracy! Monocracy! Other ocracy things! You are outnumbered, sir! Surrender!
Heather Dixon
#19. Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the monkeys and apes casually knock them down
toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings on Earth.
Carl Sagan
#20. Jeffersonian Democracy simply meant the possession of the federal government by the agrarian masses led by an aristocracy of slave-owning masses.
Charles A. Beard
#21. Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the foot of the feudal system!
William Dean Howells
#22. Bohemia is a commune in which the Revolution is over and everyone is a member of the aristocracy
Kenneth Rexroth
#23. Despite a lifetime of social indoctrination, Marcus did not believe in aristocracy of any kind.
Lisa Kleypas
#24. The old interests of aristocracy - the romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war - faded into the background, and their place was taken by the refined and intimate pursuits of peace and civilization.
Lytton Strachey
#25. Chronicling future appeasing Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain's rise to Parliament from first-generation commercial interests rather than the aristocracy, the author diagnoses even then that he had no center outside himself.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#26. Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual; and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest.
Baron De Montesquieu
#27. I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson
#28. 1872 the anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin warned Karl Marx that Communists in power would be as oppressive as the aristocracy they replaced. After what has happened in Russia, can you honestly say Bakunin was wrong?
Ken Follett
#29. 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.
Ben Carson
#30. If human beings could be propagated by cutting, like apple trees, aristocracy would be biologically sound.
John B. S. Haldane
#31. Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance.
James Bryant Conant
#32. Our aristocracy, unlike that of Europe, is open to all comers.
Josiah Strong
#33. The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood without a god.
G.K. Chesterton
#34. the Stoics had always approved of participation in public life, and this stand struck a chord with the Roman aristocracy, whose code of values placed a premium on political and military activity.
Marcus Aurelius
#35. This is a new land - a land of pretension because it is new; because classes and systems have not had that time to grow here naturally. We have no aristocracy but of virtue and talent, which is the only true aristocracy, and is the old and true meaning of the term. (Hear, hear.
Thomas D'Arcy McGee
#36. Aristocracy is kept up by family tyranny and injustice.
Thomas Paine
#37. Just as the power of the feudal aristocracy had to be broken in order for capitalism to emerge fully, so must imperialism and capitalism in Third World nations be overcome if a new system is to prevail.
Michael Parenti
#38. Good manners disappear in proportion as the influence of a Court and an exclusive aristocracy lessens; this decrease can be plainly observed from decade to decade by those who have an eye for public behavior, which grows visibly.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#39. It's not like the Middle Ages, when you had the Church and the aristocracy keeping everything nice and stagnant.
Kevin Hearne
#40. Had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins
George Orwell
#41. That was what the season was, after all- a marriage market for the offspring of the aristocracy.
Marissa Doyle
#42. But to some extent, the whole aspect of Fascism was a real hot potato. Because so many of the aristocracy were enamored of the tenets of not only fascism but also of Adolf Hitler himself. And you know, that was treading on a lot of toes.
Jacqueline Winspear
#43. Interagency cooperation was all well and good, but it was understood to be the sport of the aristocracy; rank-and-file workers like Jacob were expected to keep to their own kind.
Robert Kroese
#44. It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.
W. H. Auden
#45. I became obnoxious to the Jacobins because I reprobated their aristocracy, which aimed at usurping all legitimate authority.
Marquis De Lafayette
#46. The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
George Bernard Shaw
#47. An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.
Nancy Mitford
#49. The right constitutions, three in number- kingship, aristocracy, and polity- and the deviations from these, likewise three in number - tyranny from kingship, oligarchy from aristocracy, democracy from polity.
Aristotle.
#50. 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.
Vilfredo Pareto
#51. The protection of the masses has in all times been the pretense of tyranny - the plea of monarchy, of aristocracy, of special privilege of every kind. The slave owners justified slavery as protecting the slaves.
Henry George
#52. We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.
George Bernard Shaw
#53. The high IQ has become the American equivalent of the Legion of Honor, positive proof of a child's intellectual aristocracy ... It has become more important to be a smart kid than a good kid or even a healthy kid.
Sam Levenson
#54. The Roman clergy thus adopted the old aristocracy's ideal of libertas, which had little to do with freedom; rather, it referred to the maintenance of the privileged position of the ruling class, lest society lapse into barbarism.
Karen Armstrong
#55. The Services offer the cleanest and most natural support to an aggressive foreign policy; expansion of the empire appeals powerfully to the aristocracy and the professional classes by offering new and ever-growing fields for the honorable and profitable employment of their sons.
J.A. Hobson
#56. 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.
George Jean Nathan
#57. The artificial noble shrinks into a dwarf before the noble of nature; and in the few instances (for there are some in all countries) in whom nature, as by a miracle, has survived in aristocracy, those men despise it.
Thomas Paine
#58. Americans revered action and were suspicious of intellect, associating the life of the mind with the languid, ineffectual European aristocracy they had left behind.
Susan Cain
#59. Aristocracy is that form of government in which education and discipline are qualifications for suffrage and office holding.
Aristotle.
#60. The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#62. The aristocracy of feudal parchment has passed away with a mighty rushing, and now, by a natural course, we arrive at aristocracy of the money-bag.
Thomas Carlyle
#63. Believers in aristocracy and socialism share a faith in centralized rule, in rule by command rather than by voluntary cooperation.
Milton Friedman
#64. 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.
John Desmond Bernal
#65. We have allowed an unholy alliance of government - the new monarchy - and corporate influence - the new aristocracy - to take control of events in a way that would have made our Founders shudder.
Marianne Williamson
#66. The true policy of government is to make use of aristocracy, but under the forms and in the spirit of democracy.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#67. Of governments there are said to be only two forms - democracy and oligarchy. For aristocracy is considered to be a kind of oligarchy, as being the rule of a few, and the so-called constitutional government to be really a democracy.
Aristotle.
#68. The pedigree of honey does not concern the bee; A clover, any time, to him is aristocracy.
Emily Dickinson
#69. Even if their outward fortunes could be absolutely equalized, there would be, from individual constitution alone, an aristocracy and a democracy in every land. The fearful by nature would compose an aristocracy, the hopeful by nature a democracy, were all other causes of divergence done away.
Harriet Martineau
#70. There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
E. M. Forster
#71. We will build a society dedicated to higher ideals, and we will replace the aristocracy of money by - " " - the aristocracy of pull," said a voice beyond the group. They whirled around. The man who stood facing them was Francisco d'Anconia.
Ayn Rand
#72. Aristocracy is relative: there are all sorts of inexpensive little resorts where the son of a furniture salesman may be the arbiter of all things elegant, holding court like a young Prince of Wales.
Marcel Proust
#73. I don't believe any more in democracy. But I can't believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendid as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside a man, and he lived in a simple wooden house.
D.H. Lawrence
#74. Wherever magistrates were appointed from among those who complied with the injunctions of the laws, Socrates considered the government to be an aristocracy.
Xenophon
#75. The perversions are as follows: of royalty, tyranny; of aristocracy, oligarchy; of constitutional government, democracy.
Aristotle.
#76. Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.
Lord Acton
#77. Prelate, n. A church officer having a superior degree of holiness and a fat preferment. One of Heaven's aristocracy. A gentleman of God.
Ambrose
#78. We don't have to sit by and watch our meritocracy be replaced by a permanent aristocracy, and our democracy be undermined by dynastic wealth.
Robert Reich
#79. Antiquity is a species of aristocracy with which it is not easy to be on visiting terms.
Sophie Swetchine
#80. The strength and vitality of an empire is frequently due to the new aristocracy from the periphery.
Ronald Syme
#81. there was only one aristocracy, that of decency, and that this was not inherited or bought with money or titles, but was only gained through good deeds.
Isabel Allende
#82. The aristocracy had crumbled in her hands; the power vacuum she purchased was a good decision.
Charli Frisky
#83. Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#84. Felix Mersey might be the cream of the aristocracy, but in the boiler room Soap was undisputed king - grimy empire though it might be.
Gail Carriger
#85. If England wants a happy, well-fed aristocracy, she mustn't have wars. She can't have it both ways.
P.G. Wodehouse
#86. The aristocracy are not the farmers who work the land, and raise the produce, but are the mere consumers of the rent; and when compared with the active world, are the drones, a seraglio of males, who neither collect the honey nor form the hive, but exist only for lazy enjoyment.
Thomas Paine
#87. Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.
P.G. Wodehouse
#88. As you will be aware, gentlemen, I have made it my life's work to entertain the working classes, enrage the middle classes, and fascinate the aristocracy - but I do believe I've just met my match. Accrington 'Arry here is in a class of his own, beyond my reach.
Gyles Brandreth
#89. If I were asked where I place the American aristocracy, I should reply without hesitation that it is not composed of the rich, who are united together by no common tie, but that it occupies the judicial bench and the bar.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#90. With the advent of chivalry, the art of boxing waned. The evolution of feudal aristocracy, with other and widely different exercises, pastimes and weapons from those of the common people, made boxing unfashionable.
John Boyle O'Reilly
#91. No one seems to realise that the aristocracy is God's special gift to mankind. The burghers treat us no better than commoners. Considering our divine origins, such disrespect is the worst form of impiety. I'm sure your Grace agrees.
David Eddings
#92. Wars are popular. Contractors make profits; the aristocracy glean honour.
Ramsay MacDonald
#93. Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristocracy,
R.J. Rushdoony
#94. We have nobility in Sweden, and it comes from the old British aristocracy.
Joel Kinnaman
#95. I am astonished but not discouraged by my enormous responsibility. Devoted both from affection and duty to the cause of the people, I shall combat with equal ardor aristocracy, despotism, and faction.
Marquis De Lafayette
#96. Shall we have recourse to the art of printing? But this has not destroyed property or aristocracy or corporations or paper wealth in England or America, or diminished the influence of either; on the contrary, it has multiplied aristocracy and diminished democracy.
John Adams
#97. I hope we shall ... crush in it's birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of their country.
Thomas Jefferson
#98. Oxford is a little aristocracy in itself, numerous and dignified enough to rank with other estates in the realm; and where fame and secular promotion are to be had for study, and in a direction which has the unanimous respect of all cultivated nations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#99. In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
Charles Baudelaire
#100. The pursuit of perfection always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art.
Ralph Adams Cram
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