“Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.”
“The United States is in sore need today of an aristocracy of intellect and service. Because such an aristocracy does not exist in the popular consciousness, we are bending the knee to the golden calf of money. The form of monarchy and its pomp offer a valuable foil to the worship of money for its own sake. A democracy must provide itself with a foil of its own and none is better or more effective than an aristocracy of intellect and service.”
Address to the Students of University of California, Berkeley (March 23, 1907) as reported in The New York Times, March 24, 1907.
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Nicholas Murray Butler 17
American philosopher, diplomat, and educator 1862–1947Related quotes
XVIII, p. 483. Usually misquoted as "Democracy…while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy".
1810s, Letters to John Taylor (1814)
“What is liberal education,” pp. 4-5
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)
Context: It was once said that democracy is the regime that stands or falls by virtue: a democracy is a regime in which all or most adults are men of virtue, and since virtue seems to require wisdom, a regime in which all or most adults are virtuous and wise, or the society in which all or most adults have developed their reason to a high degree, or the rational society. Democracy, in a word, is meant to be an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy. … There exists a whole science—the science which I among thousands of others profess to teach, political science—which so to speak has no other theme than the contrast between the original conception of democracy, or what one may call the ideal of democracy, and democracy as it is. … Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.
1963, Address at Vanderbilt University
Source: Principles to Form the Basis of the Administration of the Republic (February 1794)
Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter I, p. 471.
“Aristocracy is the spirit of the Old Testament, democracy of the New.”
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
222
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Source: Minority Report
1930s, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)