"Social rank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at which certain prizes are distributed, among them rewards to the best ploughman in 'the juke's country,' and to those labourers who have remained longest in the service of one master. For the graceful duty of presentation a marchioness has been selected, who, with other visitors of high social rank, has come over from that famous hunting mansion. To meet that brilliant party the whole agricultural interest has assembled. The room is crowded with tenant farmers, the entire hunting field is present. Every clergyman in the district is here, together with the gentry, and many visitors ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... neckerchief of a rich pattern. A band, also, about the top of the head, with a cross, star, or other ornament in front, is common. Their complexions are various, depending— as well as their dress and manner— upon the amount of Spanish blood they can lay claim to, which also settles their social rank. Those who are of pure Spanish blood, having never intermarried with the aborigines, have clear brunette complexions, and sometimes even as fair as those of English women. There are but few of these families in California, being mostly those in official stations, or who, on the expiration ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... the ministers, whereby to apply their books, which otherwise (as in times past) would give themselves to hawking, hunting, tables, cards, dice, tipling at the ale house, shooting, and other like vanities." The clergy held a social rank with tradespeople; their sons learned trades, and their daughters might go out to service. Jewell says many of them were the "basest sort of people" unlearned, fiddlers, pipers, and what not. "Not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... young men, for they are all older than Fred, of lower social rank than himself. I don't attach any special importance to that, nor do I object to them on that ground; but they are, I have reason to think, ill-bred and disreputable. They know Fred to be richer than themselves, and induce him to drink and play, in the hope of getting some of his money. ...
— The Telegraph Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... me—I remember his very words—'My daughter, it will not be long now until men will seek you, until someone will ask you to share his life. Keep your ideal man safe in your heart of hearts, daughter, and remember that no matter what a suitor may have to offer of wealth or social rank, if he is not your ideal—if you cannot respect and admire him for his character and manhood alone—say no; say no, child, at any cost. But when your ideal man comes—the one who compels your respect and admiration ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... Fam. xv. 12. This rather stilted letter is nearly identical with one to the other consul-designate, another aristocrat, Claudius Marcellus. Cicero is in each case trying to do his own business, while writing to a man of higher social rank than his own.] ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... in particular being very ugly, and of a strong aboriginal type. The Changars are one of the most miserable and useless of the wandering tribes of the upper provinces. They feed, as it were, on the garbage left by others, never changing, never improving, never advancing in the social rank, scale, or utility—outcast and foul parasites from the earliest ages, and they so remain. The Changars, like other vagrants, are of dissolute habits, indulging freely in intoxicating liquors, and smoking ganjia, or ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... springs up in every group, under almost all kinds of circumstances. Let ten men start out for a walk, and in ten minutes one of them, for some reason or another, is giving the orders, is choosing and commanding. Often enough the leadership falls to social rank and standing rather than to leadership qualities. In fact, that is the chief defect in a society which builds up rank and social station; leadership falls then to men by virtue of birth, financial status or ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to some great writer the busiest, the most extended, and the most varied subject for an enduring literary work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this? But, alas! it is not these things that are necessary ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... actual duty the strict lines of military discipline were much relaxed among the cavalry, the troopers being almost all the sons of farmers and planters and of equal social rank with their officers, many of whom were their personal friends or relatives. Several of Vincent's schoolfellows were in the ranks, two or three of them were fellow-officers, and these often gathered together round a camp fire and chatted over ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... by those who could not realize how much she was at one with her people. The Queen was never more happy than when she was visiting some poor sufferer and comforting those in sorrow. Her memory for the little events which made up the lives and happiness of those far below her in social rank was amazing. She was a great and a truly democratic Queen. She gave the greater portion of her Jubilee present toward a fund to establish institutions to provide nurses ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... Britain, and the English Government practically acknowledged its inability to provide for the defence of Ireland, Henry Grattan, with other Irish patriots of equal sincerity, and some of them of even higher social rank, started the Irish Volunteer movement, to be a bulwark of the country in case of foreign invasion. When the Irish patriots found themselves at the head of an army of disciplined volunteers they naturally claimed that the country which was able to defend herself should be allowed also an independent ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Sylvia wondered. She herself had felt no attraction towards the thin, sickly woman who had so little grace or security of manner. It was constantly surprising Sylvia to discover how often people high in social rank seemed to possess no qualifications for their position. She always felt that she could have filled their places with ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... household matters; and for a while they had both kept heart, loving each other dearly, and prospering somewhat in their work. But a man who has once walked the world as a gentleman knows not what it is to change his position, and place himself lower down in the social rank. Much less can he know what it is so to put down the woman whom he loves. There are a thousand things, mean and trifling in themselves, which a man despises when he thinks of them in his philosophy, but to dispense with which puts his philosophy to so stern a proof. Let any plainest ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... were discontinued. They have been resumed, however, and are to-day prosperous as of old.[42] There are also a hospital, a home for aged women, a servants' training-school and a foundling asylum under the charge of the deaconesses. They are, as a class, of higher social rank than these of Kaiserswerth, the preponderating number of whom are from the lower grade of social life. They are also better educated. This is partly a necessity, from the fact that the city is on the border-land between two great nations and if the deaconesses are to be effective they ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... must not forget that the farmer is also a citizen and a man. He should be an intelligent citizen, and should therefore study questions of government. As a man, he should be the equal of other men of his same social rank. He therefore needs a good general education. He is more than mere farmer. While as farmer he must connect his business with its environment and out of his surroundings gain sound culture; while he should know nature, not only as its master, but as its friend; he should also be in sympathy with ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... social rank of these Bele Babees,[[6a]] children, and Pueri who stood at tables, opens up the whole subject of upper-class education in early times in England. It is a subject that, so far as I can find, has never yet been separately treated[7], and I therefore throw together such few ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... his too frequent quaffing of the wine-cup, his household bickerings, his improprieties with fair women, and his graver conjugal infidelities. The improprieties of other persons, and especially those of higher social rank than himself, might very intelligibly have been written in cipher intended to have been transcribed and printed after his death; but it would be at variance with human nature to believe that he could so unreservedly have reduced to writing all the faults and follies of ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... was in the West Indies; he was disgusted at the disastrous campaign in Santo Domingo, angry with Spain, and desired to be free for new campaigns in Europe. The First Consul, impressed by our minister's social rank in his own country, no less than by his merciless logic and solid understanding, had given his promise that debts due for the spoliation of our commerce should be paid. This promise, of which he was again reminded, could only be kept by realizing on ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... to her princely, regal even, in his strong cultivated manhood, his lofty calling and ambition, and his high social rank. As for herself, it now appeared that her beauty, whose spell she had thought no man could resist, had lured him to her side only long enough to discover what she was and who she was, and then he had turned ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... wrong, this is my temper. But he who should argue from it that I am intolerant of all persons belonging to a lower social rank than my own would go far astray. Nothing is more rooted in my mind than the vast distinction between the individual and the class. Take a man by himself, and there is generally some reason to be found in him, some disposition ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... His uncle called him a fool; and his adopted father never believed in him as a prophet, though for the honor of the family he remained his friend. After four years of preaching he mustered forty converts, slaves and men of the lowest social rank. Then he spoke more publicly, in response to new revelations commanding him to do so, denouncing boldly the superstitions of his people, exhorting them to lead pious and moral lives, and to believe in the one all-wise, almighty, and all-merciful God, who had chosen him as his ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... on his property is of a very different character, and thoroughly unlike an old English gentleman of the same social rank. Supremely indolent and unintellectual, he thinks of nothing but how he can most easily kill time. When he awakes in the morning, his attendant slave brings him his pipe, and he smokes till his first meal of tea and rusks is prepared; his bailiff then comes and makes his daily ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... knee and shoe-buckles." "His hair was powdered and gathered in a silk bag behind. He carried a cocked hat in his hand, and wore a long sword with a scabbard of polished white leather." The display of dress was not less marked in other officials, and in men of high social rank. The judges of the Supreme Court wore scarlet robes faced with velvet. "If a gentleman went abroad, he appeared in his wig, white stock, white satin embroidered vest, black satin small-clothes, with white silk stockings, and a fine broadcloth or velvet coat; if at ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... He moved his seat back a little, so as to place himself further away. Something in that action, at that time, shocked and humiliated her. Completely misunderstanding him, she thought he was reminding her of the distance that separated them in social rank. Oh, the shame of it! the shame of it! Would other governesses have taken a liberty with their master? A fit of hysterical sobbing burst its way through her last reserves of self-control; she started to her feet, and ran out ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins |
