Aristocracy: What is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.
—John Ciardi (1916–86) American Poet, Teacher, Etymologist, Translator
Fit yourself for the best society, and then, never enter it.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman’s heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.
—Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic
There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talent.
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
Real good breeding, as the people have it here, is one of the finest things now going in the world. The careful avoidance of all discussion, the swift hopping from topic to topic, does not agree with me; but the graceful style they do it with is beyond that of minuets!
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force.
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist
Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid. There is no big man who has not felt small. Some men never feel small; but these are the few men who are.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders for the nation in peace and war for generations; even a democrat like myself must admit this.
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American Head of State, Political leader, Historian, Explorer
The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder’s moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.
—Friedrich Engels (1820–95) German Socialist Political Philosopher
Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future.
—Ayn Rand (1905–82) Russian-born American Novelist, Philosopher
It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
The true policy of a government is to make use a aristocracy, but under the forms and in the spirit of democracy.
—Napoleon I (1769–1821) Emperor of France
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
—H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) American Journalist, Literary Critic
No matter her past, when a chambermaid marries a lord she becomes a lady.
—Latin Proverb
Let the others have the charisma. I’ve got the class.
—George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) American Republican Statesman, 41st President
I am his Highness dog at Kew; pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744) English Poet
The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.
—Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian Revolutionary Leader
What I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) German-born Swiss Novelist, Poet
If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success.
—Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic
I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American Writer
Each class of society has its own requirements; but it may be said that every class teaches the one immediately below it; and if the highest class be ignorant, uneducated, loving display, luxuriousness, and idle, the same spirit will prevail in humbler life.
—Unknown
Every attempt, by whatever authority, to fix a maximum of productive labor by a given worker in a given time is an unjust restriction upon his freedom and a limitation of his right to make the most of himself in order that he may rise in the scale of the social and economic order in which he lives. The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.
—Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American Philosopher, Diplomat, Educator
Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.
—Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American Sociologist
A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of government as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by government. Somewhere in between and In gradations is the group that has the sense that gov’t exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.
—Lionel Trilling (1905–75) American Literary Critic
Aristocracy is an atmosphere; it is sometimes a healthy atmosphere; but it is very hard to say when it becomes an unhealthy atmosphere. You can prove that a man is not the son of a king, or that he is not the delegate of a definite number of people. But you cannot prove that a man is not a gentleman.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
Throughout recorded time… there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable.
—George Orwell (1903–50) English Novelist, Journalist
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
—Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American Novelist Essayist
Aristocrats: Fellows that wear downy hats and clean shirts-guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) American Short-story Writer, Journalist