Aristocracy/concept

Famous quotes containing the words aristocracy and/or concept:

“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.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)

“To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain
physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much as and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined.”
—Percy W. Bridgman (1882–1961)