Aristocratic Quotes - Page 2

• The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or limited sovereignty, or absolute power is the same [whether] in a majority of a popular assembly; an aristocratic council; or oligarchical junto and a single emperor - equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody and in every respect diabolical.

  John Adams

  Political, Arbitrary, Fundamentals

  John Adams' Letter to Thomas Jefferson, founders.archives.gov. November 13, 1815.

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• But when I fell in love with black, it contained all color. It wasn’t a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Because black encompasses all colors. Black is the most aristocratic color of all.... You can be quiet and it contains the whole thing.

  Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

  Acceptance, Color, Black

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• Slavery is malignantly aristocratic.

  Antoinette Brown Blackwell

  Slavery

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• 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.

  Helena Bonham Carter

  Retirement, Struggle, Thinking

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• My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.

  Victor Hugo

  Taste, Action, Democratic

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• Too little is it considered, while we gaze on aristocratic beauty, how much good food, soft lying, warm wrapping, ease of mind, have to do with the attractions which command our admiration.

  Samuel Lover

  Lying, Mind, Ease

  Samuel Lover (1843). “Handy Andy: A Tale of Irish Life”, p.355

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• Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they're not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They're a group phenomenon, they're not very fast, they're quite sickly. So what's the pleasure of being one?

  Margaret Atwood

  Animal, Joy, Forever

  "Margaret Atwood: 'I have a big following among the biogeeks. 'Finally! Someone understands us!'". Interview with Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. August 24, 2013.

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• You aristocratic ladies and your gold-plated twats. You always think it's such a honor for me to touch you." He surveyed her with mocking green eyes. "You think you're the first high-kick wench I've ever had? I used to have blue-blooded bitches like you pay me to do this. You've gotten it for free.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Eye, Thinking, Blue

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• Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

  Thomas Mann

  Privilege, Artistic, Injustice

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

  Henry Adams

  History, Rich, Pursuit

  Henry Adams, Ernest Samuels (1992). “Henry Adams, Selected Letters”, p.204, Harvard University Press

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• Wars have ever been but another aristocratic mode of plundering and oppressing commerce.

  Richard Cobden

  Peace, War, Commerce

  Richard Cobden (1854). “Russia and the Eastern Question”, p.33

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• 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.

  Howard Zinn

  Class, World, Monopoly

  Howard Zinn (2014). “A People's History of the United States”, p.323, Pan Macmillan

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• Courts are an aristocratic institution in a democracy. That's the dilemma for an institution that has the function of reviewing the will of the people. We're bound to be "anti-majoritarian."

  Rose Bird

  Women, People, Democracy

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• Every one of the aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These... tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the "patriots," while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims - they are [called] the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight.

  Eugene V. Debs

  War, Fighting, Men

  Eugene V. Debs' speech he gave across the street from a jail, where he had just visited three socialists who were in prison for opposing the draft, June 1918.

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• I incline to an aristocratic republic. This would satisfy the ambitious spirit among our people. We shall learn from the historic mistakes of others in the same way as we learn from our own; for we are a modern nation and wish to be the most modern in the world.

  Theodor Herzl

  Mistake, People, Ambitious

  Theodor Herzl (2015). “A Jewish State: Proposal of a modern solution for the Jewish question”, p.56, BoD – Books on Demand

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• America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true. Yet now... we are threatened by a new and particularly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, or demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Dream, Country, War

  Daniel J. Boorstin (1962). “The Image or What Happened to the American Dream”

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• Everyone should be taught the nobility of labor, the heroism and splendor of honest effort. As long as it is considered disgraceful to labor, or aristocratic not to labor, the world will be filled with idleness and crime, and with every possible moral deformity.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Work, Long, Effort

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.2807, Library of Alexandria

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• We pretend to be a middle class, democratic nation, but in reality we love our blue bloods. ... We love the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before New England summer homes. How else can be explained the Bush vs. Kerry match-up that confronts us this year?

  David Brooks

  Summer, Home, School

  "Democratic aristocrats and blue collar Republicans". www.cnn.com. March 15, 2004.

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

  George Bernard Shaw

  Democracy, Aristocracy, Needs

  George Bernard Shaw (2015). “The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more”, p.2960, e-artnow

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• Fashion is aristocratic-autocratic.

  J. G. Holland

  Fashion

  J. G. HOLLAND (1866). “PLAIN TALKS ON FAMILIAR SUBJECTS”, p.50

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• So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do with ultimately what's the life that's worth living. And Plato was one of the young men who hung around him, a very aristocratic young man, came from a very old, important family.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Plato, Philosophical, Men

  "What Do We Have To Teach Plato?". "Here And Now" with Jeremy Hobson, news.stlpublicradio.org. April 22, 2014.

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• 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.

  Fanny Kemble

  Country, Two, Desire

  Fanny Kemble (1835). “Journal of a Residence in America”, p.95

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• One main condition of aristocratic life was present in the South and not in the North--personal responsibility to other human beings for education and material welfare. (A Carnegie or a Ford, like a bureaucracy, molds the lives of millions without taking any responsibility.)

  Marshall McLuhan

  Responsibility, Mold, Welfare

  Marshall McLuhan (1969). “The interior landscape: the literary criticism of Marshall McLuhan, 1943-1962”

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• All who wish to hand down to their children that happy republican system bequeathed to them by their revolutionary fathers, must now take their stand against this consolidating, corrupting money power, and put it down, or their children will become hewers of wood and drawers of water to this aristocratic ragocracy.

  Andrew Jackson

  Money, Children, Father

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• In any piece of rhetorical discourse, one rhetorical term overcomes another rhetorical term only by being nearer to the term which stands ultimate. There is some ground for calling a rhetorical education necessarily aristocratic education in that the rhetorician has to deal with an aristocracy of notions.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Overcoming, Aristocracy, Calling

  Richard M. Weaver (2016). “The Ethics of Rhetoric”, p.23, Routledge

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