The Senate was the equivalent of an aristocracy at the beginning. Senators were not even elected; they were appointed in the early days. Then that changed, and senators did become elected. But the Senate is designed to slow down out-of-control, madcap activity elsewhere in the legislative branch (i. e. , in the House), and the 60-vote rule was part of that.
Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
Wherever the appearance of a conventional aristocracy exists in America, it must arise from wealth, as it cannot from birth. An aristocracy of mere wealth is vulgar everywhere. In a republic, it is vulgar in the extreme.
Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence.
This is a new land - a land of pretension because it is new; because classes and systems have not had that time to grow here naturally. We have no aristocracy but of virtue and talent, which is the only true aristocracy, and is the old and true meaning of the term. (Hear, hear.
Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.
The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.
I'm proud of being British, but I think our aristocracy is overrated.
If a [democratic] society displays less brilliance than an aristocracy, there will also be less wretchedness; pleasures will be less outrageous and wellbeing will be shared by all; the sciences will be on a smaller scale but ignorance will be less common; opinions will be less vigorous and habits gentler; you will notice more vices and fewer crimes.
I mean, already in the French Revolution, the harpsichord becomes identified with the aristocracy, with the ancien regime. Plus, hey, you know, I mean, harpsichord is a really easy target, isn't it? I mean, it's - it's just how it is.
Tomorrow every Duchess in London will be waiting to kiss me.
I don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.
I hope we shall. . . crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations.
We are fast moving toward an aristocracy of health.
As you get older and more successful, you don't get magnetically drawn to aristocracy, you get magnetically drawn to power, and it gets magnetically drawn to you. It's a symbiosis whether you like it or not.
You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in ''the people. '' One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies.
Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.
It is true that the aristocracies seem to have abused their monopoly of legal knowledge and at all events their exclusive possession of the law was a formidable impediment to the success of those popular movements which began to be universal in the western world.
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.