"To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one's infancy; to be taught to respect one's self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; (...) to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; (...) to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honour and duty; (...) to possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative justice: these are the circumstances of men that form what I should call a natural [as opposed to feudal] aristocracy."

Edmund Burke, 1791

"It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life - these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge, they are the objects of a University."

John Henry Cardinal Newman, 1854