Johann Gottfried von Herder Quotes

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

All privileges by legislation attached to nobility, title, and rank shall be abolished.

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.

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.

On the battlefield, there is no distinction between upper and lower class.

… if one person owns the preponderance of land in a given territory, the result is monarchy; if a few own it, we have aristocracy; if the whole people be landlords, it is a commonwealth.

For many centuries Chinese society has been free of class distinctions such as are found even in advanced democracies.

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

There's an unhealthy obsession in America with royalty and the class system.

To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people.

Indeed, the existence of class, of social hierarchy, is as old as man himself. It prevails in the jungle where strength determines hierarchy; among men, it has also been savagely the same, whereby rulers vested with power through personal combat, or through lineal heritage as in the case of royalty, ravage their subjects.

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

Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.

In this country there is no rank but rank mutton.

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

Kings! Why, what's a king? .... Is their blood purer than our own? We are all the seed of Abraham!

I am no leveller; I look upon an artificial equality as equally pernicious with a factitious aristocracy; both depressing the energies and checking the enterprise of a nation.

… an anachronistic survival of monarchial privilege.

Noble and common blood is of the same color.

It is better to be the subject of a prince than of a republic, for a republic keeps its subjects under, and gives no share of its greatness save to its own citizens; a prince is common to all, one man is as much his subject as another, therefore every one can hope to be favoured or employed.

Farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses.

Gun Powder makes men equal: a citizen's musket fires as well as a nobleman's.

However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.

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

When fiefs inspired military service, it is easily discerned why females could not inherit them; but the reason is at an end.