I'm the last in the line of Russells and Chamberlains.
We have nobility in Sweden, and it comes from the old British aristocracy.
Almost in every kingdom the most ancient families have been at first princes' bastards.
Celebrity these days is completely for sale; it's not remotely mysterious. But there's something that remains glamorous and mysterious about royalty.
To Harmodius, descended from the ancient Harmodius, when he reviled Iphicrates [a shoemaker's son] for his mean birth, "My nobility," said he, "begins in me, but yours ends in you.
Nobility of birth does not always insure a corresponding unity of mind; if it did, it would always act as a stimulus to noble actions; but it sometimes acts as a clog rather than a spur.
Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.
Though you be sprung in direct line from Hercules, if you show a lowborn meanness, that long succession of ancestors whom you disgrace are so many witnesses against you; and this grand display of their tarnished glory but serves to make your ignominy more evident.
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've always been fascinated with aristocracy. I'm really interested in the Ivy Leagues, the final clubs, all the really old-money families, the concept of old money.
My mother was related to four of Jamaica's oldest families, and to say merely that she was out of the top drawer would not convey the quality of her breeding.
Noble fathers have noble children.
Nobility of birth commonly abateth industry.
For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, the sense of doom in the Calvinist.
They were indeed what was known as 'old money', which meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds which had originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant. Funny, that: a brigand for a father was something you kept quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port. Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and rogue was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of.
Of what use are pedigrees, or to be thought of noble blood, or the display of family portraits, O Ponticus?
If ancient descent could confer nobility, the lower forms of life would possess it in a greater degree than man.
The noble caste was in the beginning always the barbarian caste: their superiority lay, not in their physical strength, but primarily in their psychical - they were more complete human beings.
