#aristocracy

There are a lot of books about the passing of the English aristocracy, but the vast majority of Long Islanders don't understand their own backyard. It's a private preserve. ↗

— Nelson DeMille

#aristocracy #backyard #books #english #long

All day long the superior man is creatively active. ↗

— Fu Xi

#creation #maker #mastery #change

Wherever magistrates were appointed from among those who complied with the injunctions of the laws, Socrates considered the government to be an aristocracy. ↗

— Xenophon

#appointed #aristocracy #complied #considered #government

Ninety-nine per cent of traditional English literature concerns people who never have to worry about money at all. We always seem to be watching or reading about emotional crises among folk who live in a world of great fortune both in matters of luck and money; stories and fantasies about rock stars and film stars, sporting millionaires and models; jet-setting members of the aristocracy and international financiers. ↗

— James Kelman

#crises #emotional #english-literature #fortune #money

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#capitalism #corruption #government #history #oppression

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

#brilliant #civilization #departed #each #economic

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#aristocracy #contemporary #every #fallen #feels

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#being #danger #ethics #glory #isolates

Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance. ↗

— James Bryant Conant

#based #calling #each #elite #excellence

To add to our misery and despair, a bloated aristocracy has sent to China - the greatest and oldest despotism in the world - for a cheap working slave. ↗

— Denis Kearney

#aristocracy #bloated #cheap #china #despair