Johann Georg Zimmermann Quotes

Privileges tied to nobility, titles and rank may not be enacted.

Today nobility is gone: there is only a peerage.

It has often been said, that there is but one rank of men in America… we have no artificial distinctions of men into noblemen and commoners among us, but it ought to be remarked, that superior degrees of industry and capacity, and above all, commerce, have introduced inequality of property among us, and these have introduced natural distinctions of rank in Pennsylvania, as certain and general as the artificial distinctions of men in Europe. This will ever be the case while commerce exists in this country.

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

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

Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order.

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

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talent.

Human beings are no longer born to their place in life

The Spanish culture taught is that having titles of nobility was the way to get rich. But the Aztecs and the indigenous cultures taught us the same thing.

Honours seem to be the nature of British life. It's horrible. Maybe I'm mad, but the older I get, the less I want to have honours loaded on me.

Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?" He answered, "Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one.

The captain of a ship is not chosen from those of the passengers who comes from the best family.

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.'

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.

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

Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.

He was transfixed at the sight of the lords and ladies of his realm running about like demented chickens.

Lords are lordliest in their wine.

Kelsier smiled. 'It means that you, Vin, are a very special person. You have a power that most high noblemen envy. It is a power that, had you been born an aristocrat, would have made you one of the most deadly and influential people in all of the final empire.' Kelsier leaned forward again. 'But, you weren't born an aristocrat. You're not noble, Vin. You don't have to play by their rules--and that makes you even more powerful.

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.

In Europe there's the upper crust, and these are long, historically families and social systems that have certain established rules that's harder to break into.

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

People think there's a rigid class system here, but dukes have been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans.

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the "unfairness" of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact - in defiance of facts. It is not equality before the law that they seek, but inequality: the establishment of an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy on top - the aristocracy of non-value.