Aristocracy Quotes

I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents... (Thomas Jefferson)
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated. View quote
G. K. Chesterton
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country. View quote
Thomas Jefferson
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one. View quote
W. H. Auden
Aristocracy is always cruel. View quote
Wendell Phillips
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. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The present aristocracy of western culture, at the very moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country. View quote
John Desmond Bernal
The Pedigree of Honey Does not concern the Bee A Clover, any time, to him, Is Aristocracy. View quote
Emily Dickinson
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat. View quote
Gene Kelly
The principle feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things -- war and hunger and date rape -- liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things. It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal. (P. J. O'Rourke)
Virginia was in fact a landowning aristocracy, without nobility or merchant class, or any considerable small peasant farming class; and the other Southern colonies, except North Carolina, were on the whole similar to Virginia in these respects. View quote
Carl L. Becker
It is a known 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. View quote
Vilfredo Pareto
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. View quote
John Adams
I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. View quote
John Adams
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. View quote
Thomas Paine
The greatest characters the world have known have arisen on the democratic floor. Aristocracy has not been able to keep a proportionate pace with democracy. View quote
Thomas Paine
Aristocracy is kept up by family tyranny and injustice. View quote
Thomas Paine
I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling. View quote
James Salter
The territorial aristocracy of former ages was either bound by law, or thought itself bound by usage, to come to the relief of its serving-men and to relieve their distresses. But the manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and debases the men who serve it and then abandons them to be supported by the charity of the public. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse. (Alexis de Tocqueville)
If a [democratic] society displays less brilliance than an aristocracy, there will also be less wretchedness; pleasures will be less outrageous and wellbeing will be shared by all; the sciences will be on a smaller scale but ignorance will be less common; opinions will be less vigorous and habits gentler; you will notice more vices and fewer crimes. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
[W]hat I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system . . . a set of qualities, however, whose merit lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, AND JUST AS ACHIEVABLE THROUGH SOCIALISM AS THROUGH ARISTOCRACY. View quote
H. P. Lovecraft
There are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad manners organized. View quote
Henry James
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. View quote
John Bright