Thomas Paine Quotes

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

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

The rich and the well-born, according to the Federalist Papers, was greatly feared by the founders.

In my position, I could be a debutante. But we only got to this position by being a politically active family.

Americans should be ashamed of how aflutter they get about Downton Abbey - it's unpatriotic. I seem to remember we fought a revolution so as not to put up with this nonsense, where notions of station are so unforgiving that upper and lower echelons are practically different species.

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

Our aristocracy, unlike that of Europe, is open to all comers.

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

The great families have their privileges.

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

By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations.

Aristocrats fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society.

If there is anything good about nobility it is that it enforces the necessity of avoiding degeneracy.

There are no persons more solicitous about the preservation of rank than those who have no rank at all. Observe the humors of a country christening, and you will find no court in Christendom so ceremonious as the quality of Brentford.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The ancient nobility and gentry of the kingdom... have been thrust out of all public employment... a race of merchants, and manufacturers and bankers and loan-jobbers and contractors have usurped their place.

How superbly brave is the Englishman in the presence of the awfulest forms of danger and death; and how abject in the presence of any and all forms of hereditary rank.

Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.

Lord Salisbury constitutes himself the spokesman of a class, of the class to which he himself belongs, who'toil not neither do they spin'.