Hereditary Privilege Quotes

For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have the right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever, and tho' himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his cotemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.

Being born into the Royal Family is like being born into a mental asylum. Marrying into it is not something to be taken lightly.

Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors.

When real nobleness accompanies that imaginary one of birth, the imaginary seems to mix with real, and becomes real too.

There are those who collect the refuse of the public streets, but in order to be received into the band it is necessary to have been born one of the Hereditary Confederacy of Superfluity Removers and Abandoned Oddment Gatherers.

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.

Those who have nothing else to recommend them to the respect of others but only their blood, cry it up at a great rate, and have their mouth perpetually full of it. They swell and vapor, and you are sure to hear of their families and relations every third word.

Aristocracy is kept up by family tyranny and injustice.

Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.

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.

I wish to make it clear from the onset that at the coming election I want support on no other understanding that the new Parliament is to destroy once and for ever, the power of the hereditary chamber to reverse the decisions of the representatives of the people.

The artificial noble shrinks into a dwarf before the noble of nature; and in the few instances (for there are some in all countries) in whom nature, as by a miracle, has survived in aristocracy, those men despise it.

First of all, I am not royal... and lastly, I am not royal. It's not appropriate.

The ancient nobility and gentry of the kingdom... have been thrust out of all public employment... a race of merchants, and manufacturers and bankers and loan-jobbers and contractors have usurped their place.

I regard the son of an actress as being de facto incapacitated from being premier of England.

If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement.

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.

As long as inheritance lasts, there will be hereditary economic inequality—not the natural inequality of individuals, but the artificial inequality of classes—which will necessarily continue to be expressed in hereditary inequality of the development and cultivation of intelligence and will remain the source and sanction of all political and social inequality.

All nobility in its beginnings was somebody's natural superiority.

For a very long time, and among a large number of peoples, political power has belonged to the owners of the land

It is better to be the builder of our own name than to be indebted by descent for the proudest gifts known to the books of heraldry.

Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.

How superbly brave is the Englishman in the presence of the awfulest forms of danger and death; and how abject in the presence of any and all forms of hereditary rank.

The Civil Service is a self-perpetuating oligarchy, and what better system is there?

I do not believe that the children of presidents or vice-presidents should be assigned to combat zones. They have no place there.