(40 quotes found)
“Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance.”
James Bryant Conant
“Let us in education dream of an aristocracy of achievement arising out of a democracy of opportunity”
Thomas Jefferson
“There is...an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy.”
“Democracy... while it lasts is more bloody than either [aristocracy or monarchy]. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”
John Adams
“Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”
G. K. Chesterton
“An aristocracy is the true support of a monarchy”
Napoleon Bonaparte
“The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
“Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos”
Polybius
“I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our Government to trial, and bid defiance to the laws of our country”
“The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
