Heather Brooke Quotes

The problem is that the U.K. in essence is a feudal society. It's everyone in their place.

… if one person owns the preponderance of land in a given territory, the result is monarchy; if a few own it, we have aristocracy; if the whole people be landlords, it is a commonwealth.

I have so much respect for the Queen and for Charles, and what the family represents. And yet there's still a conflict about whether we can abolish the class system while also having a Royal family.

Of course, you wouldn't want to re-create the era of aristocracy; it was a totally unfair era. The finer aspects of it were admirable, and so there's nostalgia for that: the behavior, the values, the cultural sensitivities.

As in the Divine Right of Kings, hierarchies invest those who preside at the top of their pyramidal structure with absolute power to rule over the lesser ranks that spread down like a marble staircase to the broad foundation stones of those with no power at all.

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.

The breath of an aristocrat is the death rattle of freedom.

It has always been the aim of royalty and aristocracy to lower the individual liberty and independence of the common people. A baron and a minute-man could not breathe the same air.

I'm proud of being British, but I think our aristocracy is overrated.

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

That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.

Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.

Our democracy may have an aristocracy of talent, as Jefferson said – which is fine – but we don’t want everyone else to be left out. Something like that seems to be happening, though.

To detail the real evils of aristocracy, they must be seen in Europe.

I am no leveller; I look upon an artificial equality as equally pernicious with a factitious aristocracy; both depressing the energies and checking the enterprise of a nation.

The great families have their privileges.

The evils of European society were rooted in feudalism and entrenched in privilege.

The preposterous distinctions of rank, which render civilization a curse, by dividing the world between voluptuous tyrants and cunning envious dependents, corrupt, almost equally, every class of people, because respectability is not attached to the discharge of the relative duties of life, but to the station…

Tory society is a closed society, in which birth and wealth have priority.

The Magna Carta was the first class-based charter, enforced on the monarchy by the rising class.

The great have private feelings of their own, to which the interests of humanity and justice must curtsy. Their interests are so far from being the same as those of the community, that they are in direct and necessary opposition to them; their power is at the expense of OUR weakness; their riches of OUR poverty; their pride of OUR degradation; their splendour of OUR wretchedness; their tyranny of OUR servitude.

There is only one class of men, the privileged class

I believe that Britain is becoming more class-conscious, and I quake at the very idea of Old Etonians ruling the world again.

If the rabble were lopped off at one end and the aristocrats at the other, all would be well with the country.

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.