Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.

It is nobler to be good, and it is nobler to teach others to be good, and less trouble!

A fully equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts, and dukes are just as great a terror -- and they last longer.

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

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.

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

Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.

You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.

All that is noble is in itself of a quiet nature, and appears to sleep until it is aroused and summoned forth by contrast.

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.