Browsing Topic Best Aristocratic Quotes

Five or six hundred [aristocratic] heads lopped off would have assured you repose and happiness; a false humanity has restrained your arm and suspended your blows; it will cost the lives of millions of your brothers.

In the work of the greatest geniuses, humble beginnings will reveal themselves somewhere, but one cannot trace the slightest sign of them in Shakespeare … I am not concerned with who wrote the works of Shakespeare … but I can hardly think it was the Stratford boy. Whoever wrote them had an aristocratic attitude.

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class — whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

Slavery is malignantly aristocratic.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.

In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking…. Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.

It will be said that the joy of mental adventure must be rare, that there are few who can appreciate it, and that ordinary education can take no account of so aristocratic a good. I do not believe this. The joy of mental adventure is far commoner in the young than in grown men and women. …It is rare in later life because everything is done to kill it during education.

I’m actually as common as mud. I’m not particularly well read, or bred. But the way I look… I seem to have this sort of ‘aristocratic’ demeanor.

Occasionally, when I lived in London, I would have sex with a girl from an aristocratic family. I always enjoyed doing to them what their ancestors did to my country.

Most people live in the city and go to the country at the weekend, and that’s posh and aristocratic, but actually to live in the country and come to London when you can’t take it any more is different.

It is the clash of two different worlds that makes British-ness unique – we have an aristocratic, noble history, but it is always contrasted with something rebellious.

I mean, in the history of poetry there have been a lot poetries where you have to inherit the position of poet from your ancestors and I think that if you just leave anyone to become a poet based on an aristocratic society, then a lot of people are left out who might have something to offer.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.

We stand a better chance with aristocracy, whether hereditary or elective, than with monarchy.

America’s egalitarian mandate reflects the liberality of the creator, and thus countermands, by divine witness, all feudal and aristocratic structures. It also parallels the Jewish concept of repair the world, or Tikkun ha’olam, which holds that the human spirit is in partnership with God to help finish the work of creation.

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

I have to struggle to change people’s perceptions of me. I grew very frustrated with the perception that I’m this shy, retiring, inhibited aristocratic creature when I’m absolutely not like that at all. I think I’m much more outgoing and exuberant than my image.

Politics of all sorts, I confess, are far beyond my limited powers of comprehension. Those of this country as far as I have been able to observe, resolve themselves into two great motives. The aristocratic desire of elevation and separation, and the democratic desire of demolishing and levelling.

You are the only woman who has a sense of gaiety, a wise tolerance – no more, you seem to urge me to betray you. I love you for that. […] I don’t know what to expect of you, but it is something in the way of a miracle. I am going to demand everything of you – even the impossible, because you encourage it. You are really strong. I even like your deceit, your treachery. It seems aristocratic to me.

The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company was not worthy of the joke. They have introduced an almost insane individualism into that one form of intercourse which is specially and uproariously communal. They have made even levities into secrets. They have made laughter lonelier than tears.

The gitano is the most distinguished, profound and aristocratic element in my country, the one that most represents its Way of being and best preserves the fire, the blood and the alphabet of Andalusian and universal truth.

To make Democracy work, you need an aristocratic democracy. To make Aristocracy work, you need a democratic aristocracy.

It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.

I really don’t feel exclusiveMy ambition instead, perhaps because of my peasant-worker background, is to look at the world with others, not as an aristocratic intellectual.

[ Massachusetts constitution] was [John Adams] attempt to justify that structure by the traditional notion of social estates – that the executive represented the monarchical estate, the senate the aristocratic estate, and the house of representatives the estate of the people.

It is no longer simply the merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the employing class, that is exploiting the world: it is the nation, a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor.

Fashion is aristocratic-autocratic.

Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.

There is something to be said about laying bare the vocabulary of the aristocratic measure, right? There’s something to be said about allowing the powerless to tell their own story.

The aristocratic mind … is anti-analytical. It is concerned more with the status of being than with the demonstrable relationship of parts.

Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.