It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.
Abraham Lincoln
The idea of elegance and aristocratic indulgence of an ocean cruise was born out of the image of the rich men and women who ruled the British Empire slowly sailing to India and the Far East while sipping gin and tonic on deck - served by men in white jackets.
Adam Curtis
Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat. It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.
Alain de Botton
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
Americans overall may live better than medieval aristocrats could dream of, but that means nothing when oligarchs live in the neighborhood next door, flaunting their luxurious homes and top-quality private schools.
Alissa Quart
In 1939, Fitzroy Maclean, a gangly Highland aristocrat in his early 30s, was serving as a British diplomat in the U.S.S.R. Disgusted by the Soviet show trials, he quit the Foreign Service and would go on to serve with Tito's partisans fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia.
Alistair Horne
If the rabble were lopped off at one end and the aristocrats at the other, all would be well with the country.
Andrew Johnson
Slavery is malignantly aristocratic.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell
I'm not an aristocrat. I have no idea what that is.
Benjamin Bratt
It was a JOB; the video show was a JOB; you don't tell the Aristocrats joke at 8 o'clock at night on network tv, it would be funny though. But those guys know I like dirty stuff, I like clean stuff too.
Bob Saget
Now people want what the movie was about, which is violent comedy. And that's really what The Aristocrats is based on - what will a family do out of desperation.
I have three kids, the oldest is 18 and her friends are going to see it The Aristocrats because they told her they're going to see it, especially her guy friends.
In aristocratic societies, rich people used to commission exquisite paintings for their walls.
Brad Holland
No one would ever cast me as an aristocrat. I think the big thing about being an Irish artist is access to melancholy. Especially the American Irish. The availability of loss, some kind of pain, is an important part of who we are. I think my Irishness gave me that.
Brian Dennehy
We certainly grew up and had opportunities. But it's not like our parents are aristocratic blue bloods.
Cameron Winklevoss
Hollywood was a detour, although my mother was an aristocrat from Tokyo who ran away to join the theatre, so acting is in my genes.
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
My mother Diana was a true-blue aristocrat, descended from William the Conqueror and listed in 'Burke's Peerage.' My father David, from a poor Scottish family, was a doctor.
Celia Imrie
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
Charles Baudelaire
People tend to think that I know less about what I'm talking about than I actually do - usually people who think that all aristocrats are stupid.
Christopher Monckton
I think that, often, actors represent what they're not. You get people who define the aristocracy who are not aristocratic - they're lower-middle class or working class. An awful lot of your so-called angry young actors have grown up in extreme bourgeois comfort. It really is surprisingly common.
Colin Firth
Most people live in the city and go to the country at the weekend, and that's posh and aristocratic, but actually to live in the country and come to London when you can't take it any more is different.
I liked being on stage because it gave me a reason to be around people. The other great thing about acting is it allows you to imagine circumstances different from your own. I was a poor Bay Area kid getting to pretend to be a Russian aristocrat.
I was very struck by the fact that Robin Hood became increasingly taken over by the middle and upper classes. He starts out a bandit but becomes a fully fledged aristocrat.
Polo has always had an old-fashioned, aristocratic English feel.
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.
We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.
Reformist kings can save their dynasties now by helping their countries move smoothly into democracy, or they will end their years in exile like the Russian aristocrats of a century earlier.
I am for poetry that is admired by peasant and aristocrat alike.
Throughout my career, I was to be cast as a frontier girl, an aristocrat, an Arabian, a Eurasian, a Polynesian, and a Chinese.
All the people at university were very aristocratic - except me, because I was on scholarship. And everyone there voluntarily wore suits and ties every day. And this was in the '60s!
The breath of an aristocrat is the death rattle of freedom.
If you or I had lived 500 years ago, our worldview, and the decisions we made as a result, would have been utterly different. Our minds are shaped by our social environment, in particular the belief systems projected by those in power: monarchs, aristocrats and theologians then; corporations, billionaires and the media today.
The Senate was an odd compromise between the founders and the early leaders of the republic who wanted a single house which was based on popular sovereignty representing the people and those founders who wanted two houses, the upper house, the Senate, being the more aristocratic.
The other guy I dug a lot was Burroughs because he was a smart man already; he learned it through the druggie pool - the street scene of an old aristocratic kind of man.
Nabokov can be almost too delicate at times, but in 'Lolita,' he puts his aristocratic sensitivity to use in such a dark tale that it creates this great tension between the story being told and the style that it's written in. And it's just amazing that one of the best novels in English was written by a Russian.
I have to struggle to change people's perceptions of me. I grew very frustrated with the perception that I'm this shy, retiring, inhibited aristocratic creature when I'm absolutely not like that at all. I think I'm much more outgoing and exuberant than my image.
It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.
When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.
I find the aristocratic parts of London so unattractive and angular; the architecture is so white and gated. But in New York, it's different - even uptown it's really grand, and there's no real segregation there. It's all mixed up.
I've played a lot of very posh, sort of noble or aristocratic English people, which is nothing like what I am, so I feel that there is quite a lot distance there and have played a little bit far away from myself.
As I look back now I can see that I was a perfect little aristocrat.
You don't have to be born wealthy and have an aristocratic last name or have connections or all these things. If you have a dream, you can believe in something and work hard and struggle and fight for it and still have a chance to succeed.
An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic.
I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality.
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
I do keep getting these bad girl roles. The funny thing is that, honestly, I don't think I'm believable as these aristocratic mean girls. But I do love playing them.
If I could have picked an era to have lived, I think I would've loved to have been one of Louis XIV's mistresses. They were so fantastic and aristocratic, and they had so much power. And he was such a renaissance man. I think I would've fit into that nicely.
I do love playing aristocrats, probably because it's so against type. So much more interesting than playing a version of yourself.
In liberal democracy and anxious anarchy, the traditional classic dance, compact of aristocratic authority and absolute freedom in a necessity of order, has never been so promising as an independent expression as it is today.
Monarchs, aristocrats, and other powerful and wealthy individuals have usually been happy to have themselves and their possessions and families immortalised in oil paintings and sculpture. But before the 20th century, such dynasts rarely commissioned artworks that set out to represent society as a whole.
