Francis II Quotes

Somewhere among every man's ancestors is a prince or a lord, a priest or a saint, and don't forget it. Wake up! Inherit the wealth of your ancestors!.. Stop living like a mouse, live like the rich people do.

No one enjoys being equal.

Do the adherents of this mad theory [Evolution] realize the disgrace they are bringing on the most respectable families! There is not an aristocracy in Europe or America that can stand it one moment. For aristocracy is based on the greatness of forefathers…. With a monkey in the background, how can even a Hapsburg or a Guelf put on airs of superiority? How must he hide his face in shame to think, that, as his line lengthens into an obscure antiquity, the foreheads of his house slope, and their jaws project; that he has literally been all his life aping aristocracy, instead of being the real thing; and that, when he has reached his true beginning, his only consolation must be found in the fact that his great skulking, hulking, gibbering baboon of an ancestor rejoices, like himself, in the possession of "the third lobe," "the posterior cornu of the lateral ventricle," and "the hippocampus minor.

When everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody.

When the people you love are gone, you're alone.

I started putting down my thoughts on paper out of loneliness while I was studying in America. I was very close to my grandfather, and when he died, I couldn't visit home. I started scribbling those thoughts.

To die is as if one's eyes had been put out and one cannot see anything any more. Perhaps it is like being shut in a cellar. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and are gone. One does not see anything and notices only the damp smell of putrefaction.

All men are created equal, it is only men themselves who place themselves above equality.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors.

You don’t want no pie in the sky when you die.

If you try and level society, then nobody will do anything.

Because you are a great noble, you think you are a great genius! Nobility, a fortune, a rank, appointment to office: all this makes a man so proud! What did you do to earn all this? You took the trouble to get born—nothing more.

There is no distinction of persons among them, and deference is shown to merit rather than to noble blood.

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

Kings! Why, what's a king? .... Is their blood purer than our own? We are all the seed of Abraham!

We have been taught by experience the danger of the levelling spirit.

All who have died are equal.

The colored people should not urge that they be placed on an equality with white people.

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…

All men are equal; it is not their birth, but virtue itself that makes the difference

All men are created equal in one respect, at least, and that is their desire to be unequal.

The mind is lowered through association with inferiors. With equals it attains equality; and with superiors, superiority.

… in a republic where all are free and equal--prosperity and position constitute rank.

You know our nation. If a citizen officer of one town has just one more silver button on his epaulette than another, great hue and cry arises and the important cause goes by the board …