Definition of Aristocracy

Aristocracy

Government by the best citizens.

A ruling body composed of the best citizens.

A form a government, in which the supreme power is vested in the principal persons of a state, or in a privileged order; an oligarchy.

The nobles or chief persons in a state; a privileged class or patrician order; (in a popular use) those who are regarded as superior to the rest of the community, as in rank, fortune, or intellect.

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Aristocracy Quotations

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.
Thomas Jefferson

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

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.
George Bernard Shaw

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
Charles Baudelaire

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
W. H. Auden

A superfluity of wealth, and a train of domestic slaves, naturally banish a sense of general liberty, and nourish the seeds of that kind of independence that usually terminates in aristocracy.
Mercy Otis Warren

The old interests of aristocracy - the romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war - faded into the background, and their place was taken by the refined and intimate pursuits of peace and civilization.
Lytton Strachey

Wherever magistrates were appointed from among those who complied with the injunctions of the laws, Socrates considered the government to be an aristocracy.
Xenophon

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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.
George Jean Nathan

The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.
John Desmond Bernal

To add to our misery and despair, a bloated aristocracy has sent to China - the greatest and oldest despotism in the world - for a cheap working slave.
Denis Kearney

The aristocracy of Western Europe has absolutely tabooed silver in those countries and driven it away from there. Here it finds its only resting place.
Richard Parks Bland

We stand a better chance with aristocracy, whether hereditary or elective, than with monarchy.
Ezra Stiles

In revolt against this new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition.
Ralph A. Cram

The best Governments of the World have bin composed of Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy.
Algernon Sydney

Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested.
Hervey Allen

Our aristocracy, unlike that of Europe, is open to all comers.
Josiah Strong

The pursuit of perfection always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art.
Ralph A. Cram

Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance.
James Bryant Conant

An organized effort is making to deceive the people. There are two great enemies of thought and progress, the aristocracy of royalty and the aristocracy of gold.
Mary Elizabeth Lease

An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.
Nancy Mitford

The fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land if you do not show that you have some humanity still among you.
James Larkin

Aristocracy is always cruel.
Wendell Phillips

More Aristocracy Quotations

Aristocracy Translations

aristocracy in French is aristocratie
aristocracy in German is Aristokratie {f}, Aristokratie {f}, Adel {m}
aristocracy in Spanish is aristocracia
aristocracy in Swedish is aristokrati

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