Patrick Rothfuss Quotes

The conservatives say they are protecting the values of society. They are protecting their privileges.

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.

The great families have their privileges.

The landed men are the true owners of our political vessel, the moneyed men are no more than passengers in it.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

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.

I was no Marie Antoinette. I was not born to nobility, but I had a human right to nobility.

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.

Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them.

His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants hall.

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

Every society naturally divides itself into classes. The author of nature has bestowed on some greater capacities than on others--birth, education, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters. In every society, men of this class will command a superior degree of respect--and if the government is so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the powers of it, it will, according to the natural course of things, be in their hands.

The distinctions separating the social classes are false, in the last analysis they rest on force.

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.

Scratch a pessimist, and you often find a defender of privilege.

Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die, But leave us still our old nobility.

Noble and common blood is of the same color.

There are two great enemies of thought and progress, the aristocracy of royalty and the aristocracy of gold.

At the bottom of the Wealth curve Men and Women starve and children die young. In the broad middle of the curve all is turmoil and motion: people rising and falling, climbing by talent or luck and falling by alcoholism, tuberculosis and other kinds of unfitness. At the very top sit the elite of the elite, who control wealth and power for a time – until they are unseated through revolution or upheaval by a new aristocratic class. There is no progress in human history. Democracy is a fraud. Human nature is primitive, emotional, unyielding. The smarter, abler, stronger, and shrewder take the lion's share. The weak starve, lest society become degenerate:

Our elite has not evolved in 20 years, and the instincts of this elite are not democratic.

I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country

The threat to men of great dignity, privilege, and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth.

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

Jean Jacques Rousseauis nothing but a fool in my eyes when he takes it upon himself to criticise society; he did not understand it, and approached it with the heart of an upstart flunkey.... For all his preaching a Republic and the overthrow of monarchical titles, the upstart is mad with joy if a Duke alters the course of his after-dinner stroll to accompany one of his friends.