Edmund Burke Quotes

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

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

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.

Language does not make one an elite.

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.

I deeply detest social distinction and snobbery, and in that lies my strong aversion to titular honours.

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality.

Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.

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.

All shall equal be. The Earl, the Marquis, and the Dook, The Groom, the Butler, and the Cook, The Aristocrat who banks with Coutts, The Aristocrat who cleans the boots.

To their entertainments princes invite only the nobility; but when they meet with misfortune, they invite also citizens.

...a blue blood, a snob

What is the use of your pedigrees?

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

The great families have their privileges.

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

Our ideas of the life and business of a soldier were drawn chiefly from the adventures of Ivanhoe and Charles O'Malley, two worthies with whose personal history almost every man in the army was familiar. The men who volunteered went to war of their own accord, and were wholly unaccustomed to acting on any other than their own motion…. Their officers were of themselves, chosen by election, and subject, by custom, to enforced resignation upon petition of the men…. There was one sort of rank, however, which was both maintained and respected from the first, namely, that of social life. The line of demarkation between gentry and common people … rests … upon an indeterminate something or other, known as family. To come of a good family is a patent of nobility, and there is no other way whatever by which any man or any woman can find a passage into the charmed circle.

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.

Chivalry only worked with men of the same class.

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

I don't go hunting with kings and princes.

Character and class are character and class. Either you have it or you don't.