Aristocratic Society Quotes

Aristocracy: A combination of many powerful men, for the purpose of maintaining their own particular interests. It is consequently a concentration of all the most effective parts of a community for a given end, hence its energy, efficiency and success.

Anyone suffering Downton Abbey withdrawal symptoms will find an instant tonic.

Antiquity is a species of aristocracy with which it is not easy to be on visiting terms.

Though, with the ascendancy of Louis, the political power of the nobles finally came to an end, France remained, in the whole complexion of her social life, completely aristocratic.

To be a woman condemned to a wretched and disgraceful punishment is no impediment to beauty, but it is an insurmountable obstacle to power. Like all persons of real genius, her ladyship well knew what accorded with her nature and her means. Poverty disgusted her -subjection deprived her of two-thirds of her greatness. Her ladyship was only a queen amongst queens: the enjoyment of satisfied pride was essential to her sway. To command beings of an inferior nature, was, to her, rather a humiliation than a pleasure.

This man [Chesterfield], I thought, had been a Lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among Lords.

I have never said that human society ought to be aristocratic, but a great deal more than that. What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic. Of course I am speaking now of society and not of the State.

You have no idea what's going to happen [in Downton Abbey] until you get the script. We roughly knew a couple of the key points that were going to happen, but when I got the last episode, I turned to the last page to check that I was still alive.

Tired, ashamed, and mortified, I begged to sit down till we returned home, which I did soon after. Lord Orville did me the honour to hand me to the coach, talking all the way of the honour I had done him ! O these fashionable people!

I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.

I'm English and I'm used to coming from a world of period dramas, where there's a very polite restraint to everything. Everybody's sort of sitting in drawing rooms.

I bet you Cinderella didn't get along with Prince Charming's friends. Oh sure, the knights and barons probably put up with her on account that she was pretty and had such dainty feet and all, but you should know every duchess and contess in the kingdom hated her guts.

Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.

The finest chroniclers of the great and the near-great have often been courtiers - the Duc de Saint-Simon, for instance, or Lady Murasaki.

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. American novels, answered Lord Henry.

I mean, in the history of poetry there have been a lot poetries where you have to inherit the position of poet from your ancestors and I think that if you just leave anyone to become a poet based on an aristocratic society, then a lot of people are left out who might have something to offer.

I have never been in, nor have I had any strong particular desire to be in, what is termed a costume drama, but I keep forgetting to think of 'Charles II' as a costume drama.