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Aristocracy Quotes

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Aristocracy Quotes

“Generally we think of white supremacist views as having their origins with the unlettered, underprivileged, poorer-class whites. But the social obstetricians who presided at the birth of racist views in our country were from the aristocracy: rich merchants, influential clergymen, men of medical science, historians and political scientists from some of the leading universities of the nation. With such a distinguished company of the elite working so assiduously to disseminate racist views, what was there to inspire poor, illiterate, unskilled white farmers to think otherwise? Soon the doctrine of white supremacy was imbedded in every textbook and preached in practically every pulpit. It became a structural part of the culture. And men then embraced this philosophy, not as the rationalization of a lie, but as the expression of a final truth.”

AmericaCultureWealthClassElitesWhite SupremacyAristocracy
Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
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“Compare with Greek art, modern classical art is lacking in warmth and immediacy; it has a derived, retrospective, and, even in the Renaissance, a more or less classicistic character. It It is the reflection of a society which, filled with reminiscences of Roman heroism and medieval chivalry, tries to appear to be something which it is not, by following an artificially produced social and moral code, and which stylizes the whole pattern of its life in accordance with this fictitious scheme. Classical art describes this society as it wants to see itself and as it wants to be seen. There is hardly a feature in this art which would not, on closer examination, prove to be anything more than the translation into artistic terms of the aristocratic, conservative ideals cherished by this society striving for permanence and continuity. The whole artistic fromalism of the Cinquecento merely corresponds to the formalized system of moral conceptions and decorum which the upper class of the period imposes on itself. Just as the aristocracy and the aristocratically minded circles of society subject life to the rule of a formal code, in order to preserve it from the anarchy of the emotions, so they also submit the expression of the emotions in art to the censorship of definite, abstract, and impersonal forms.”

ArtCensorshipRenaissanceAristocracyClassicismPolitic
Book:The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque
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“Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others. The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another, the rivalry of groups for the resources of the soil, and then war. Trade and finance develop, and bring new class-divisions. "Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones - you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states". A mercantile bourgeoisie arises, whose members seek social position through wealth and conspicuous consumption: "they will spend large sums of money on their wives". These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy - wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of parts and the lust of the spoils of office. Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle. Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth. In rather case the end is revolution. When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims, but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease. Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power. But even democracy ruins itself by excess – of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses. As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them; to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is only necessary to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play (a hit, no doubt, at Aristophanes, whose comedies attacked almost every new idea). Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course. The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so “hungry for honey” that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the “protected of the people” rises to supreme power. (Consider the history of Rome). The more Plato thinks of it, the more astounded he is at the folly of leaving to mob caprice and gullibility the selection of political officials – not to speak of leaving it to those shady and wealth-serving strategists who pull the oligarchic wires behind the democratic stage. Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters – like shoe-making – we think only a specially-trained person will server our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.”

WarPoliticsDemocracyHuman NaturePoliticiansPolitical PhilosophyAristocracyPopulismDemocracy Voting
Book:The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
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“She was simple, not being able to adorn herself, but she was unhappy, as one out of her class; for women belong to no caste, no race, their grace, their beauty and their charm serving them in place of birth and family. Their inborn finesse, their instinctive elegance, their suppleness of wit, are their only aristocracy, making some daughters of the people the equal of great ladies.”

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Book:A Piece of String / The Necklace
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“Wait, wait,' he began, interrupting Oblonsky. 'Aristocratism, you say. But allow me to ask, what makes up this aristocratism of Vronsky or whoever else it may be - such aristocratism that I can be scorned? You consider Vronsky an aristocrat, but I don't. A man whose father crept out of nothing by wiliness, whose mother, God knows who she didn't have liaisons with... No, excuse me, but I consider myself an aristocrat and people like myself, who can point to three or four honest generations in their families' past, who had a high degree of education (talent and intelligence are another thing), and who never lowered themselves before anyone, never depended on anyone, as my father lived, and my grandfather. And I know many like that. You find it mean that I count the trees in the forest, while you give away thirty thousand to Ryabinin; but you'll have rent coming in and I don't know what else, while I won't, and so I value what I've inherited and worked for... We're the aristocrats, and not someone who can only exist on hand-outs from the mighty of this world and can be bought for twenty kopecks. 'But who are you attacking? I agree with you,' said Stepan Arkadyich sincerely and cheerfully, though he felt Levin included him among those who could be bought for twenty kopecks.”

ClassAristocracyLevinOblonsky
Book:ANNA KARENINA
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“It is true that Harvard and Yale, as well as other upper-class institutions, offer free tuition, some cash scholarships, and nominal paid employment to the highest-ranking graduates of accredited secondary schools, without regard for the social class origins of these students. One can, it is true, meet a coal miner's or a farmer's son at Harvard, although it is a rare experience. The task of Yale and Harvard, however, is to mold these bright youngsters into unconscious servitors of the ruling class—as lawyers, as corporate scientists, as civil servants, as brokers, bankers, and clergymen. The enforced "democratic" mingling effected by the new house plans assures this result more positively now than ever, for in the past, many students were made to feel like pariahs by their exclusion from the quasi-aristocratic clubs.”

ClassCapitalismHarvardAristocracyYaleClass StruggleRuling ClassYale UniversityHarvard University
Book:America's 60 Families
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“Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient. In this respect aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry; for things commonly grow larger and more obscure as they are more remote; and, for this two-fold reason, they are better suited to the delineation of the ideal.”

PoetryDemocracyAristocracy1840
Book:Democracy in America
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“Anyway, because of Beezy’s patrician vibe and the fact that our parents grew up in a very horses-and-beeswax part of an already pretty aristocratic area of the state, you would have thought they were marked for success. You would have thought they couldn’t have avoided it! But well into their youth each of the five really did their utmost to scupper their own chances in life in utterly idiosyncratic ways, which is the usual province of the middle-to-upper-middle class. We didn’t realize this at the time, of course. To us, our parents were doing just fine.”

ChildrenParentsElitesAristocracyUpper ClassUnderminingPatricians
Book:Idle Grounds
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“Lady Sylvia McCordle: Mr Weissman -- Tell us about the film you're going to make. Morris Weissman: Oh, sure. It's called "Charlie Chan In London". It's a detective story. Mabel Nesbitt: Set in London? Morris Weissman: Well, not really. Most of it takes place at a shooting party in a country house. Sort of like this one, actually. Murder in the middle of the night, a lot of guests for the weekend, everyone's a suspect. You know, that sort of thing. Constance: How horrid. And who turns out to have done it? Morris Weissman: Oh, I couldn't tell you that. It would spoil it for you. Constance: Oh, but none of us will see it.”

HumorSocietyMoviesAristocracyFilm IndustryMovie BusinessMysteriesDetective StoriesWhodunnits
Book:Gosford Park: The Shooting Script
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“The Beggar King (Sonnet 2314) I wear the same casual outfit everywhere, pair of jeans with a shirt or tshirt - people wear fancy clothes either to look and feel good, or impress others, I have no need for either, so I walk like beggar. Vanity and validation are for the small of mind, Himalayan Human has no need for cosmetic adornment. The Sun is beyond the realms of humility and hubris, I'm neither humble nor hubrous, just burning with mission. I wear my backbone as battery, brain is my currency, heart is my bedrock, character is my legacy. I see neither man nor woman, I only see human; I see neither rich nor poor, I only see behavior. Savages are known by aristocratic opulence, Sapiens is known by vagrant virtue-n-valiance.”

VirtueSacrificeVanitySufismAdvaitaMonkAristocracyDervishCharacter Backbone
Book:Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat
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“At any rate, the principles of a noble manner of life and the ethics of the nobility now take on the clear and uncompromising form known to us from the chivalric epic and lyric. We often find the new members of a privileged group to be more rigorous in their attitude to questions of class etiquette than the born representatives of the group; they are more clearly conscious of the ideas which hold the particular group together and distinguish it from other groups than are men who grew up in those ideas. This is a well-known and often-repeated feature of social history; the novus homo is always inclined to over-compensate for his sense of inferiority and to emphasize the moral qualifications required for the privileges which he enjoys. In the present case, too, we find that the knights who have risen from the ranks of the retainers are stricter and more intolerant in matters of honour than the old aristocrats by birth. What seems to the latter a matter of course, something that could hardly be otherwise than what it is, appears to the newly ennobled an achievement and a problem. The feeling of belonging to the governing class, one of which the old nobility had scarcely been conscious, is for them a great new experience. Where the old-style aristocrat acts instinctively and makes no pretensions about it, the knight finds himself faced with a special task of difficulty, an opportunity for heroic action, a need to surpass himself—in fact to do something extraordinary and unnatural. In matters in which a born grand seigneur takes no trouble to distinguish himself from the rest of mankind, the new knight requires of his peers that they should at all costs show themselves different from ordinary mortals.”

NobleKnightsEtiquetteAristocracyChivalryBehaviorsMoral CodesThe Established And Outsiders
Book:The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages
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“Rousseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’ because in practice the people are not in power at all. Instead we’re allowed to decide who holds power over us. It’s also important to realise this model was originally designed to exclude society’s rank and file. Take the American Constitution: historians agree it ‘was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period’. It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics. Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies—think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes. Time and again we hope for better leaders, but all too often those hopes are dashed. The reason, says Professor Keltner, is that power causes people to lose the kindness and modesty that got them elected, or they never possessed those sterling qualities in the first place. In a hierarchically organised society, the Machiavellis are one step ahead. They have the ultimate secret weapon to defeat their competition. They’re shameless.”

Aristocracy2020Founding FathersMachiavelliDemocratic RepublicShamelessness
Book:De meeste mensen deugen: Een nieuwe geschiedenis van de mens
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“We are the bourgeoisie—the third estate, as they call us now—and what we want is a nobility of merit, nothing more. We don't recognize this lazy nobility we now have, we reject our present class hierarchy. We want all men to be free and equal, for no one to be someone else's subject, but for all to be subject to the law. There should be an end of privileges and arbitrary power. Everyone should be treated equally as a child of the state, and just as there are no longer any middlemen between the layman and his God, so each citizen should stand in direct relation to the state. We want freedom of the press, of employment, of commerce. We want all men to compete without any special privileges, and the only crown should be the crown of merit.”

FreedomDemocracyCompetitionEqualityGermanyMiddle ClassHierarchyMonarchyAristocracyStateBourgeoisieSocial ClassProtestantism
Book:Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
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“The art of the High Renaissance is absolutely secular in its outlook; even in the representations of religious subjects, it attains its ideal style not by contrasting natural with supernatural reality, but by creating a distance between the objects of natural reality itself - a distance which in the world of visual experience creates differences of value similar to those that exist between the elite and the masses in human society. Its harmony is the utopian ideal of a world from which all conflicts is excluded, and, moreover, not as a result of the rule of a democratic but of an autocratic principle. Its creations represent an enhanced, ennobled reality exempt from transitoriness and banality. Its most important stylistic principle is the restriction of the representation to the bare essentials.”

ArtPoliticsAristocracyEssentialismAutocraticHigh Renaissance
Book:The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque
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“The social function of court life is to enlist the support and adherence of the public for the ruling house. The Renaissance princes want to delude not only the people, they also want to make an impression o the nobility and bind it to the court. But they are not dependent on either its services or its company; they can use anyone, of whatever descent, provided he is useful. Consequently, the Italian courts of Renaissance differ from the medieval courts in their very constitution; they accept into their circle upstart adventurers and merchants who have made money, plebeian humanists and ill-bred artists - entirely as if they had all the traditional social qualifications. In contrast to the exclusive moral community of court chivalry, a comparatively free, fundamentally intellectual type of salon life develops at these courts which is, on the one hand the continuation of the aesthetic social culture of middle-class circles, such as described in the Decamerone and in the Paradiso degli Alberti, and represents, on the other, the preparatory stage in the development of those literary salons which play such an important part in the intellectual life of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

IntellectualCourtMiddle ClassAristocracySocial ClassSalon
Book:The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque
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“[The Edwardian era] was a time of booming trade, of great prosperity and wealth in which the pageant of London Society took place year after year in a setting of traditional dignity and beauty. The great houses—Devonshire, Dorchester, Grosvenor, Stafford and Lansdowne House—had not yet been converted into museums, hotels and flats, and there we danced through the long summer nights till dawn. The great country-houses still flourished in their glory, and on their lawns in the green shade of trees the art of human intercourse was exquisitely practised by men and women not yet enslaved by household cares and chores who still had time to read, to talk, to listen and to think.”

SocietyAristocracyEdwardian
Book:Winston Churchill: An Intimate Portrait
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“... capacitatea de adaptare a aristocrației s-a manifestat în capacitatea ei de a “nu discuta” și de a “sluji”. Discutau intelectualii – aristocrații au dovedit neașteptate disponibilități pentru muncă. Poate știuseră cîndva să se țină în șa și să sărute mîinile femeilor, dar nu trebuie să uităm niciodată că au reprezentat o clasă, că au avut un caracter de clasă. Filozofia, etica și morala lor le erau atribuite prin naștere, și dacă acestea aparțineau clasei lor, ei nu trebuiau să cheltuiască nici forțe spirituale, nici forțe fizice pentru a-și forma convingeri și principii ... Ei puteau să îndeplinească o funcție, să execute ordine, conducîndu-se după ideile cinstei și datoriei, fără să intre în conflict cu conștiința lor. Aceasta este capacitatea de care au dat ei dovadă. N-au acceptat nimic din schimbările survenite, dar au continuat să trăiască într-o lume schimbată, pentru a păstra măcar acele trăsături care le erau caracteristice, inerente structurii lor ... precum: cinstea, principialitatea, respectarea cuvîntului dat, noblețea, onoarea, curajul, dreptatea, stăpînirea de sine... Ei au pierdut totul, însă aceste trăsături ar fi dorit să le piardă în ultimul rînd: erau însăși natura lor.”

AristocracyAccomodationAristocratieAdaptare
Book:Pushkin House
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“The cultured court singer of heroic lays disappears along with the heroic spirit of his public, but heroic poetry survives the heroic age and is more long-lived than the society to which it owes its origin. After the decline of the military aristocratic culture, it turns from an exclusive class interest into a universal art. The fact that this declension was so easily brought about, and that the same kind of poetry could be understood and enjoyed by the upper and lower classes almost simultaneously, can only be explained by assuming that the difference in cultural standards between the rulers and the ruled cannot have been anything like so great as in later ages. It is true that from the very beginning the rulers lived in a different sphere from the people, but they were not yet so conscious of the gulf that divided them from the lower classes.”

MilitaryPoetEpicAristocracyFolkHeroic Tradition
Book:The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages
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“The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail,” warned Schumpeter, who added that the middle class is “rationalist and unheroic.” In fact, middle class man “can only use rationalist and unheroic means to defend his position or to bend a nation to his will.” These are disturbing words for Americans, who are egalitarians to the core. The notion that “all men are created equal” is branded into our consciousness. But let us be honest for a moment. Men are hardly created equal in reality. If you factored in education and training, men would not long remain equal even if they were created so. Some are naturally gifted from childhood. Some benefit from hard training and long study. It used to be that aristocracy, under the best circumstances, was a training in leadership that would begin at infancy. What we are now left to is the training of opportunists by state functionaries.”

AristocracyHoly GrailEgalitarianSchumpeter
Author:J.R.Nyquist
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“In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated. Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but their wealth.”

OppressionAristocracyFrench Revolution1968AntisemitismPolitical StruggleWealth DisparityAlexis De Tocqueville
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“Один зі способів зрозуміти нещодавню історію — уявити собі чергу по каву: уранці ви йдете до «Старбаксу», відчайдушно потребуючи чашки звичайної кави, перш ніж почнете класти цеглу, а тим часом молода особа в костюмі для йоги від Lulu Lemon влізає перед вами без черги і замовляє лате без піни зі знежиреним мигдалевим молоком — на двадцять осіб. Потім ця людина, яка влізла без черги, обертається до вас і починає читати вам лекцію про те, який ви сексист, агресивний «расист, котрому, перш ніж висловлюватися, варто згадати про свої привілеї.”

RebellionAristocracyProletariatMeritocracyMarginalization
Book:The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
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“Laws were made to establish a gradation of ranks; but it was soon found that the soil of America was opposed to a territorial aristocracy. To bring that refractory land into cultivation, the constant and interested exertions of the owner himself were necessary; and when the ground was prepared, its produce was found to be insufficient to enrich a proprietor and a farmer at the same time. The land was then naturally broken up into small portions, which the proprietor cultivated for himself. Land is the basis of an aristocracy, which clings to the soil that supports it; for it is not by privileges alone, nor by birth, but by landed property handed down from generation to generation, that an aristocracy is constituted. A nation may present immense fortunes and extreme wretchedness; but unless those fortunes are territorial, there is no true aristocracy, but simply the class of the rich and that of the poor.”

AristocracyLand Ownership1835Gentry
Book:Democracy in America
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“Show the people that our Old Nobility is not noble, that its lands are stolen lands - stolen either by force or fraud; show people that the title-deeds are rapine, murder, massacre, cheating, or court harlotry; dissolve the halo of divinity that surrounds the hereditary title; let the people clearly understand that our present House of Lords is composed largely of descendants of successful pirates and rogues; do these things and you will shatter the Romance that keeps the nation numb and spellbound while privilege picks its pocket.”

PrivilegeAristocracyHouse Of LordsLand Ownership
Book:Our Scots noble families
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“As she gracefully descended down portico, the white gloved hand of the lady of the estate met the white-glove worn by a Negro footman, as a vast expanse of hoop skirt filled the carriage doorway. It was a skirt of fine white lawn with ruffles embroidered with little pink and blue flowers complete with green stems. The white trash girl looked on in amazement, involuntarily wincing at the thought of the long hours plantation slave seamstresses had devoted to decorating a dress that might only be worn a half dozen times and survive as many launderings.”

SlaveryAristocracyPlantationsSouthern BellePlantationSouthern BellesAntebellum White
Author:Gwen Bistrow
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“..the guests milled back and forth: men stood with their heads together, discussing politics and crops, their stiff white shirts puffed and ruffled, their voices rising and falling in steadfast opinions as women of fair whispered to one another and laughed behind silk fans, occasionally calling out gaily to pull another into their ring of white shoulder flounced with satin as house niggers dipped and weaved all around them bearing trays of syllabub and sack, almost invisible as the shadows they cast”

SlaveryAristocracyPlantationsOpulenceBayouOld SouthSouthern BellesSouthern Gentlemen
Author:Pamela Jekel
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“It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear me, ANY kind of royalty, howsoever modified, ANY kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its aristocracies -- a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions... The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world. And for all this, the thanks they got were cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they took even this sort of attention as an honor.”

GovernmentReligionSlaveryMonarchyAristocracySerfdom
Author:Mark Twain
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“An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king, - Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn, - mud from a muddy spring, - Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leech-like to their fainting country cling, Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, - A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field, - An army, which liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who would wield, - Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless - A book sealed; A Senate, - Time's worst statue unrepealed, - Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day. - Sonnet: England in 1819”

GovernmentEnglandMonarchyAristocracyMoral Bankruptcy
Book:Percy Bysshe Shelley: An Anthology
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“The romantic idealism, the self-conscious ‘sentimental’ heroism of chivalry are idealism and heroism at second hand, and originate primarily in the ambition and the deliberation with which this new nobility set about developing the notions of its own peculiar honour. Its zeal is only a sign of unsureness and weakness which the old nobility does not, or at least did not, suffer from as long as uninfluenced by the new, inwardly unstable, company of the knights. This instability shows itself most strikingly in its equivocal attitude to the conventional forms of noble living. On the one hand, it clings to the superficialities and exaggerates the formalities of the aristocratic manner of life; on the other hand, it sets inward nobility of soul above the outward and purely formal nobility of birth and manners. Conscious of its subordinate position, it exaggerates the value of mere forms, but conscious also of possessing capacities equal to or even greater than those of the old aristocracy, it, at the same time, depreciates the value of such forms and of noble birth as such.”

HonorAnxietyAristocracyChivalrySubordinateNew Comer
Book:The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages
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