Fulke Greville Quotes

Those who have nothing else to recommend them to the respect of others but only their blood, cry it up at a great rate, and have their mouth perpetually full of it. They swell and vapor, and you are sure to hear of their families and relations every third word.

I have wondered sometimes if there are not perhaps some disadvantages in having really blue blood in one's veins, like grandmamma and me.

I'm not from aristocracy, or anything like that.

Neither money nor position can atone to me for low birth.

Because you are a great noble, you think you are a great genius! Nobility, a fortune, a rank, appointment to office: all this makes a man so proud! What did you do to earn all this? You took the trouble to get born—nothing more.

Kings! Why, what's a king? .... Is their blood purer than our own? We are all the seed of Abraham!

What is the use of your pedigrees?

Somewhere among every man's ancestors is a prince or a lord, a priest or a saint, and don't forget it. Wake up! Inherit the wealth of your ancestors!.. Stop living like a mouse, live like the rich people do.

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

Do the adherents of this mad theory [Evolution] realize the disgrace they are bringing on the most respectable families! There is not an aristocracy in Europe or America that can stand it one moment. For aristocracy is based on the greatness of forefathers…. With a monkey in the background, how can even a Hapsburg or a Guelf put on airs of superiority? How must he hide his face in shame to think, that, as his line lengthens into an obscure antiquity, the foreheads of his house slope, and their jaws project; that he has literally been all his life aping aristocracy, instead of being the real thing; and that, when he has reached his true beginning, his only consolation must be found in the fact that his great skulking, hulking, gibbering baboon of an ancestor rejoices, like himself, in the possession of "the third lobe," "the posterior cornu of the lateral ventricle," and "the hippocampus minor.

To Harmodius, descended from the ancient Harmodius, when he reviled Iphicrates [a shoemaker's son] for his mean birth, "My nobility," said he, "begins in me, but yours ends in you.

High birth is a thing which I never knew any one to disparage except those who had it not; and I never knew any one to make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of.

It is a great deal easier for a man to find a pedigree to fit his virtues than virtues to fit his pedigree.

Of what use are pedigrees, or to be thought of noble blood, or the display of family portraits, O Ponticus?

Spurn not the nobly born with love affected; nor treat with virtuous scorn the well connected.

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.

A friend of mine jokes that I have a painstaking royalty complex. Like maybe I was a duke in a past life.

I was no Marie Antoinette. I was not born to nobility, but I had a human right to nobility.

Her name was called Lady Helena Herring and her age was 25 and she mated well with the earl.

I was born into a very important family in Japan. My grandfather was a descendant of the Emperor, and we were very wealthy.

I think of myself as a young prince from a long line of royalty.

In the past, people were born royal. Nowadays, royalty comes from what you do.

I was not to the manor born.

Apart from life, a strong constitution, and an abiding connection to the Thembu royal house, the only thing my father bestowed upon me at birth was a name, Rolihlahla.

She wanted us to feel we were above everyone in the town. She really did tell us that we were related to Chief Justice John Marshall, and that may have been true. I never did bother to find out.