Benjamin Franklin Quotes

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?

I don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.

It is fortunate to be of high birth, but it is no less so to be of such character that people do not care to know whether you are or are not.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'

Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents;... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.

There is no distinction of persons among them, and deference is shown to merit rather than to noble blood.

Conduct, and conduct alone, entitles to respect: that not what men are, but what they do, constitutes their claim to deference … merit, and not birth, is the only rightful claim to power and authority

I'm not interested in classes ... Far be it from me to foster inferiority complexes among the workers by trying to make them think they belong to some special class.

The preposterous distinctions of rank, which render civilization a curse, by dividing the world between voluptuous tyrants and cunning envious dependents, corrupt, almost equally, every class of people, because respectability is not attached to the discharge of the relative duties of life, but to the station…

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.

Labor, in fact, to Spanish pride, was the badge of inferiority, to be escaped in every possible way. It is the general complaint of the publicists of the seventeenth century that every one sought to gain a livelihood in the public service or in the Church, and no one to earn it by honest work.

A Plowman on his knees is higher than a Gentleman on his legs.

What a lot of people don't understand is, you can't really do nothing for power - you're either born with it or you aren't.

Trade is so far here from being inconsistent with a gentleman, that, in short, trade in England makes gentlemen; for, after a generation or two, the tradesmen's children, or at least their grandchildren, come to be as good;, gentlemen, statesmen, parliament-men, privy-councilors, judges, bishops, and noblemen, as those of the highest birth, and the most ancient families.

A bloated aristocracy rakes the slums of Asia to find the meanest slave on earth—the Chinese coolie—and imports him here to meet the free American in the labor market and further widen the breach between the rich and the poor, still further to degrade white labor.

In America, our origins matter less than our destinations and that is what democracy is all about.

What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?

We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords.

Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.

Trying to be a sort of intellectual in the public arena is very irritating to people. They think, 'Why is this bugger on television?'

Sometimes I think that the public's lack of criticism of the rich - and how they seek their pleasure - might derive from the fact that Americans still believe they will one day be joining their number.

The days of noblesse oblige are long behind us, so our elite's entire claim to legitimacy rests on theories of equal opportunity and upward mobility, and the promise that 'merit' correlates with talents and deserts.

The fight is over two fundamentally different ideas about the nature of America. On one side are those who believe that that every hardworking person should be able to rise. On the other are those who believe that wealthy white men should always rule over a permanent class of workers.