#aristocracy

Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?" He answered, "Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#aristocracy #birthright #meritocracy #nobility #talent

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 A. Cram

#aristocracy #art #august #civil #definite

The fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land if you do not show that you have some humanity still among you. ↗

— James Larkin

#aristocracy #fate #humanity #industry #land

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

— Ezra Stiles

#better #better chance #chance #elective #hereditary

All day long the superior man is creatively active. ↗

— Fu Xi

#creation #maker #mastery #change

I believe in aristocracy, though -- if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secreat understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but power to endure, and they can take a joke. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#considerate #e-m #forster #pluck #sensitive

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

#aristocracy #been #chicken #cut #dead

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence. ↗

— Eugene Victor Debs

#capitalism #feudalism #inequality #justice #labor

In revolt against this new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition. ↗

— Ralph A. Cram

#aristocracy #came #century #character #directed

A superfluity of wealth, and a train of domestic slaves, naturally banish a sense of general liberty, and nourish the seeds of that kind of independence that usually terminates in aristocracy. ↗

— Mercy Otis Warren

#banish #domestic #general #independence #kind