Ludwig von Mises Quotes

Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class.

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

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

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

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 don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.

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

England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.

In terms of the class structure that you see so much in European portraiture, I don't think one feels that in America in the 21st century. But we have these other kinds of social structures now, like celebrity, who establish new hierarchies.

Class - or the economic status of individuals - is evident in all societies, some very well stratified by a rigid caste system determined by birth.

English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.

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

The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent.

The problem is that the U.K. in essence is a feudal society. It's everyone in their place.

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

I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.

'Downton Abbey' is a pageant, a cavalcade of a time when being born right is the first and most irrevocable career move, and in which an older order - whose passing 'Downton's' creator, Julian Fellowes, clearly mourns - is submerging in icy seas as surely as a grand and extravagant ocean liner.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

There are only two classes - first class and no class.

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.

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.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors.

Keep up the middle class; lop off aristocracy on the one hand, and a rabble at the other; let the middle class ... have the power.

The division of society into estates or castes means in effect that conceptually and organizationally these ‘natural’ forms are established without their economic basis ever becoming conscious