There exists a false aristocracy based on family name, property, and inherited wealth. But there likewise exists a true aristocracy based on intelligence, talent and virtue.
Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristocracy.
Aristocracy is kept up by family tyranny and injustice.
When culture is created in boardrooms with a panel of six or seven strategists for the masses to follow, to me that is no different than an aristocracy. It's not created from the people in the middle of the streets, so to speak. It is created from a petri dish for the sake of making money, and it is undermining the longevity of the culture.
Aristocracy: government by the badly educated.
Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.
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.
Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence.
To make Democracy work, you need an aristocratic democracy. To make Aristocracy work, you need a democratic aristocracy.
Instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger than benefit to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society and scattered with equal hand through all its conditions, was deemed essential to a well-ordered republic.
London is a good fashion city. They're a little more daring. There's the element of the aristocracy, which is always interesting.
Good manners disappear in proportion as the influence of a Court and an exclusive aristocracy lessens; this decrease can be plainly observed from decade to decade by those who have an eye for public behavior, which grows visibly.
Virginia was in fact a landowning aristocracy, without nobility or merchant class, or any considerable small peasant farming class; and the other Southern colonies, except North Carolina, were on the whole similar to Virginia in these respects.
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.
In an autocracy, one person has his way; in an aristocracy, a few people have their way; in a democracy, no one has his way.
Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat.
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
There is only one true aristocracy. . . and that is the aristocracy of passionate souls!
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.
Aristocracy is always cruel.