Quotes & Sayings About Noblemen

They were a most unusual group of colonists. Instead of noblemen, craftsmen, and servants - the types of people who had founded Jamestown in Virginia - these were, for the most part, families - men, women, and children who were willing to endure almost anything if it meant they could worship as they pleased. — Nathaniel Philbrick

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer. — George Bernard Shaw

Yes, but where were you?" Ham asked pointedly. "We've been worried sick that you were out doing something ... well, stupid."
"Actually," Breeze noted, "we took it for granted that you were doing something stupid. We've just been wondering how stupid this particular even would turn out to be. So, what is it? Did you assassinate the lord prelan? Slaughter dozens of noblemen? Steal the clock off the Lord Ruler's own back?"
"I destroyed the Pits of Hathsin," Kelsier said quietly.
The room fell silent.
"You know," Breeze finally said, "you'd think that by now we'd have learned not to underestimate him. — Brandon Sanderson

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. — Henry David Thoreau

Kelsier smiled. 'It means that you, Vin, are a very special person. You have a power that most high noblemen envy. It is a power that, had you been born an aristocrat, would have made you one of the most deadly and influential people in all of the final empire.'
Kelsier leaned forward again. 'But, you weren't born an aristocrat. You're not noble, Vin. You don't have to play by their rules
and that makes you even more powerful. — Brandon Sanderson

Travel makes all men countrymen, makes people noblemen and kings, every man tasting of liberty and dominion. — Amos Bronson Alcott

Butter has the same improbable myth of origin as cheese, that it accidentally got churned in the animal skins of central Asian nomads. Easily spoiled in sunlight, it was a northern food. The Celts and the Vikings, and their descendants, the Normans, are credited with popularizing butter in northern Europe. Southerners remained suspicious and for centuries maintained that the reason more cases of leprosy were found in the north was that northerners ate butter. Health-conscious southern clergy and noblemen, when they had to travel to northern Europe, would guard against the dreaded disease by bringing their own olive oil with them. — Mark Kurlansky

Nature makes all the noblemen; wealth, education, or pedigree never made one yet. — Josh Billings

I'd love to have a 19th Century Russian book club where all the members had to act like the pretentious minor noblemen they were reading about. — Gary Shteyngart

I'll follow, as they say, for reward. He that rewards me, God reward him. If I do grow great, I'll grow less; for I'll purge, and leave sack, and live cleanly, as a nobleman should do. — Francis Bacon

There is a great number of noblemen among you that are themselves as idle as drones, that subsist on other men's labour, on the labour of their tenants, whom, to raise their revenues, they pare to the quick. — Thomas More

Are there any religions on your list that include the slaughter of noblemen as a holy duty? — Brandon Sanderson

Perhaps propriety is as near a word as any to denote the manners of the gentleman; elegance is necessary to the fine gentleman; dignity is proper to noblemen; and majesty to kings. — William Hazlitt

High heels weren't always a girl thing. In the fifteen-hundreds, the riding shoes of French noblemen were fitted with raised heels so that their feet stayed put in the stirrups. Over the next few decades, heels inched higher on dress shoes, particularly among men of privilege. — Patricia Marx

Where land was controlled by noblemen and/or the Church in other parts of Europe, in the province of Holland, circa 1500, only 5 percent of the land was owned by nobles, while peasants owned 45 percent of it. — Russell Shorto

According to Melissa Mailey, we now live in a world where kings and noblemen rule the roost. And they've turned all of central Europe - our home, now, ours and our children's to come - into a raging inferno. We are surrounded by a Ring of Fire. Well, I've fought forest fires before. So have lots of other men in this room. The best way to fight [such] a fire is to start a counterfire. So my position is simple. I say we start the American Revolution - a hundred and fifty years ahead of schedule! — Michael Stearns

A citizen of the United States, means a member of this new nation. The principle of government being radically changed by the revolution, the political character of the people was also changed from subjects to citizens.
The difference is immense. Subject is derived from the latin word 'sub' and 'jacio', and means one who is under the power of another; but a citizen is an unit of mass of free people, who, collectively, possess sovereignty .
Subjects look up to a master, but citizens are so far equal, that none have hereditary rights superior to others. Each citizen of a free state contains, within himself, by nature and constitution, as much of the common sovereignty as another. In the eye of reason and philosophy, the political condition of citizens is more exalted than that of noblemen. Dukes and earls are the features of kings, and may be made by them at pleasure; but citizens possess in their own right original sovereignty. — David Ramsay

Young Surrey now lays down his knife and begins to complain. Noblemen, he laments, are not respected as they were in the days when England was great. The present king keeps about himself a collection of men of base degree, and no good will come of it. Cranmer creeps forward in his chair, as if to intervene, but Surrey gives him a glare that says, you're exactly who I mean, archbishop. — Hilary Mantel

The only book Papa had ever read, apart from the Bible, was Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He believed that the even greater British Empire would go the same way unless noblemen fought to preserve its institutions, especially the Royal Navy, the Church of England, and the Conservative Party. He was right, Fitz had no doubt. — Ken Follett

The inquiry in England is not whether a man has talents and genius, but whether he is passive and polite and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen's opinions in art and science. If he is, he is a good man. If not, he must be starved. — William Blake

The Enquiry in England,' Blake said, 'is not whether a man has talents and genius, but whether he is passive and polite and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen's opinions in arts and science. — Adam Nicolson

Never let the estate decrease in your hands. It is only by such resolutions as that that English noblemen and English gentlemen can preserve their country. I cannot bear to see property changing hands. — Anthony Trollope

I truly love our Code of Chivalry. We are taught that noblemen must take everything and say nothing. Noblemen must stand alone. Well, we're men, and men aren't born to stand alone.
-Myles of Olau — Tamora Pierce

Of course, I believe most of the older noblemen are actually bringing their sons - only ones eligible for marriage, of course - to dance with me. The consensus seems to be that I would make a pretty good catch.
You aren't going to marry a boring nobleman's boring son.
No?
No, because if one proposes to you, he'll be eaten by morning. Dragons have very healthy appetites.
Draconi don't eat people.
I've been looking for a new hobby. — C.J. Redwine

Is Abelone beautiful? I asked myself, surprised. Then I left home to go to the Academy for Young Noblemen; it was the start of a distasteful and harmful period. But there at Soro whenever I separated myself from the others and they let me stand in peace at the window I would look out in amongst the trees; and in such moments and at night the certainty grew in me that Abelone was beautiful. And I started writing her all those letters, lengthy ones and short, many of them secret letters in which I thought I was writing about Ulsgaard and about my present unhappiness . But, as I see it now, they may well have been love letters. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The mind makes the nobleman, and uplifts the lowly to high degree. — Seneca The Younger

Susan had never before come across the idea that you could rise in Society by, as it were, gaining marks, especially since such noblemen as she'd met in her father's house had used neither serviette nor napkin but a state of mind, which was Drop it on the floor, the dogs'll eat it. — Terry Pratchett

How, then, did it happen that this same France forty years later came to be crushed on the battlefield by a nation it outnumbered fivefold? Why should its noblemen be split up into factions, its bourgeoisie in revolt, its people overwhelmed by excessive taxation, its provinces lawless and plagued by roving gangs engaged in pillaging and crime, all authority flouted, the currency weakened, trade at a standstill, and poverty and violence rife everywhere? Why this collapse? What caused this reversal of fortune? It was mediocrity. The mediocrity of just a few kings, their vanity and self-importance, their frivolousness in the conduct of their affairs, their inability to attract talented advisors, their nonchalance, their presumptuousness, their failure to draw up grand designs or even to follow those already conceived. — Maurice Druon

Nature's noblemen are everywhere,
in town and out of town, gloved and rough-handed, rich and poor. Prejudice against a lord, because he is a lord, is losing the chance of finding a good fellow, as much as prejudice against a ploughman because he is a ploughman. — Nathaniel Parker Willis

Princes know themselves to be princes, and are not snobs; besides, they believe themselves to be so far above everything that is not of their blood royal that noblemen and commoners appear, in the depths beneath them, to be practically on a level. — Marcel Proust

We are being at once wisely aware of our own frivolity if we avoid hitting and whacking and prefer 'striking' and 'smiting'; talk and chat and prefer 'speech' and 'discourse'; well-bred, brilliant, or polite noblemen (visions of snobbery columns in the Press, and fat men on the Riviera) and prefer the 'worthy, brave and courteous men' of long ago. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes. — George Herbert

Across the hillside, above the chaos of Montfort's left flank, a scarlet banner was raised by Edward's men, the dragon at its centre a terror wreathed in golden flames, a sign that there was to be no mercy. The noblemen who survived the battle would be taken prisoner and ransomed, but no such chivalry awaited the foot soldiers beyond. — Robyn Young

I have known a German Prince with more titles than subjects, and a Spanish nobleman with more names than shirts. — Oliver Goldsmith

Early eighteenth-century Italy saw facial powder at the center of the biggest scandal ever to befall a cosmetics manufacturer. A woman named Signora Toffana, who was well known in upper-class social circles, created a face powder that contained lead and arsenic and sold it to the wives of noblemen and the wealthy. The more affectionate the husband was with pecks on his wife's cheeks, the faster he died from the toxic powder. An estimated 600 husbands died this way, and Toffana was executed as an accomplice in their deaths. — Samuel S. Epstein

There was an air of indifference about them, a calm produced by the gratification of every passion; and through their manners were suave, one could sense beneath them that special brutality which comes from the habit of breaking down half-hearted resistances that keep one fit and tickle one's vanity - the handling of blooded horses, the pursuit of loose women. — Gustave Flaubert