Ezra Stiles Quotes

I'm proud of being British, but I think our aristocracy is overrated.

… 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.

I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.

The great families have their privileges.

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.

Britain's legal structure is basically the same as in feudal times: laws are written for the elite.

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

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

I don't like the royal family, I don't like the establishment, I don't like the civil service.

That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.

To detail the real evils of aristocracy, they must be seen in Europe.

Thus our [British] democracy was from an early period the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic.

Aristocracy is like cheese. The older it is the higher it becomes.

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

Monarchy and aristocracy, valuable and useful as I think them, are still valuable and useful as means, and not as ends.

I have so much respect for the Queen and for Charles, and what the family represents. And yet there's still a conflict about whether we can abolish the class system while also having a Royal family.

Honours seem to be the nature of British life. It's horrible. Maybe I'm mad, but the older I get, the less I want to have honours loaded on me.

Of distinction by birth or badge, [Americans] had no more idea than they had of the mode of existence in the moon or planets. They had heard only that there were such, and knew that they must be wrong.

An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.

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.

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.

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.

Royalty mostly seem like members of some anachronistic faith, like the Amish, peculiar in gilded buggies.