Boethius Quotes

I can make a lord, but only God can make a gentleman.

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.

Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.

Honor sinks where commerce long prevails.

I'm not from aristocracy, or anything like that.

Nobility, without virtue, is a fine setting without a gem.

It is not so much that I am a blue-blooded oligarch: I just don't feel like an oligarch.

We recognize the nobility as the foremost defenders of liberty and of the present constitution. We charge unto the virtue, citizenship and honor of every nobleman the reverence of its sanctity and the safeguarding of its durability, as the sole bulwark of the country and of our liberties.

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents;... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.

Aristocracy is that form of government in which education and discipline are qualifications for suffrage or office holding.

What is Aristocracy? A corporation of the best, the bravest.

Here lies Hincmar the thief. But his savage greed aside, he did one truly noble thing. He died.

The great families have their privileges.

I have made you a count and a duke, but I could not make you a gentleman.

Bestow rewards, erect statues, confer even titles so that they be personal alone; but never bind the crown of merit on the brow of sloth.

Commoners are not allowed to wear cotton clothing, under pain of death.

A Plowman on his knees is higher than a Gentleman on his legs.

I do not understand how an aristocracy can exist, unless it be distinguished by some quality which no other class of the community possesses.

The artificial noble shrinks into a dwarf before the noble of nature; and in the few instances (for there are some in all countries) in whom nature, as by a miracle, has survived in aristocracy, those men despise it.

Nobility is not only in forgiveness.

Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.

Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us - by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. 'To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law.'

Here in England the welfare of the State depends on the conduct of our aristocracy.

Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.

It is a great deal easier for a man to find a pedigree to fit his virtues than virtues to fit his pedigree.