(n.) A form a government, in which the supreme power is vested in the principal persons of a state, or in a privileged order; an oligarchy.
(n.) The nobles or chief persons in a state; a privileged class or patrician order; (in a popular use) those who are regarded as superior to the rest of the community, as in rank, fortune, or intellect.
Example Sentences:
(1) But now people are thinking about the public school elites, aristocracy, City of London investment bankers, corporate lobbyists, and the imperialist warmongers, apologists and conspirators in the media, not as instruments of good government and a healthy democracy, but as dangerous impediments to it.
(2) In contrast to other European countries, Britain's aristocracy also managed to avoid obliteration by adapting and assimilating.
(3) They include some of her greatest artists, scientists, industrialists and statesmen and stateswomen; most of her older aristocracy; and her present Queen.
(4) You couldn’t go home because your head was buzzing”: It was in the Flying Squad that Malton was first to come across those members of the underworld's aristocracy.
(5) Estate agents report that the top end of the market is booming, and there is no greater sign of the desirability of a stately home - authentically historic or imitation - than in Britain's new aristocracy: footballers.
(6) I sympathise a little with Hunt – he was born into military aristocracy, a cousin of the Queen, went to Charterhouse, then Oxford, then into PR: trying to get him to understand the life of an overworked student nurse is like trying to get an Amazonian tree frog to understand the plot of Blade Runner.
(7) It threatened to sweep away the privileges of an inward looking aristocracy convinced that their glory days would never end.
(8) I was surprised to find how widespread the belief in ghosts was among the aristocracy.
(9) And he despised them because he saw them as entrenching the prestige and status of the aristocracy.” Caligula wanted to rule as an autocrat and he was contemptuous of the pretence that the senate had any power at all.
(10) "All of this behaviour supporting the aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades.
(11) Eugenie Bouchard, the Canadian rising fast through the aristocracy of women’s tennis, swept aside the German Angelique Kerber on Wednesday to book her place in the Wimbledon semi-finals.
(12) To begin with, not all "sherpas" are Sherpas – porters from other parts of Nepal now do a lot of the heavy lifting, leaving Sherpas as a labour aristocracy of mountain guides.
(13) These great families formed what Annan called an "intellectual aristocracy", who bequeathed to their descendants not money or titles, but rather "some trait of personality, some tradition of behaviour, which did not perish with the passing of the years".
(14) There is a history of Britain that is about empire, aristocracy, monarchy, the established church, exploitative employers, and so on.
(15) We want to ask him about his three ex-wives, the future of the aristocracy, and whether he has days where he'd like to throw his titles in the dam and bog off to live with the Chacma baboons of Mozambique.
(16) Huxley was a child of England's intellectual aristocracy.
(17) Kate Middleton might just about be construed into an example of upward social mobility from the affluent middle classes into the aristocracy.
(18) In its turn, this raunchy and rebellious interpretation came under attack in the 1980s for disregarding the forces of the conservative establishment, underestimating the still formidable power of monarchy, aristocracy and Church of England.
(19) Such families worked their way into the aristocracy, courted royalty and found themselves and their descendants partly eroded by economic pressures and personal tragedies in the second half of the 20th century.
(20) He graduated in 1897 and was, in turn, a country general practitioner, the principal medical officer of an overcrowded plague-ship bringing home soldiers from the Boer War, senior surgeon of St Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne then, in London, surgeon-in-chief of his own hospital converted to the 'Hospital for Wounded Officers' with promotion to the ranks of brigadier-general and rear-admiral, then knighted and, finally, a consultant surgeon with private hospitals in Park Lane and in Cannes, and with patients largely drawn from the aristocracy, the rich and the famous.
Theocracy
Definition:
(n.) Government of a state by the immediate direction or administration of God; hence, the exercise of political authority by priests as representing the Deity.
(n.) The state thus governed, as the Hebrew commonwealth before it became a kingdom.
Example Sentences:
(1) On the other hand, the expectation that authority will be bestowed by market forces following a miraculous ‘‘transfer of wealth’’ does suggest an alternative route to normal democratic processes: theocracy via plutocracy.
(2) "It doesn't mean we're going to establish a theocracy and force people to obey what they think is God's law."
(3) Or, if you believe the other side, Santa Monica has upheld the values of the founding fathers, rebuffed a plot to impose theocracy and scored a victory for reason.
(4) Given the unusual grandeur of the Buddhist temples and palaces in the settlement, Mes Aynak might once have been a theocracy like Tibet, with the monks exploiting the copper reserves as a source of power and profit, not unlike the Cistercian monks who dominated the pre-industrial economy in many parts of medieval France and England.
(5) In the eyes of Morsi's Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, it was a military coup; to the government's supporters it was a popular overthrow, with a little help from the military, of an administration that had broken its promises on moderation; created widespread discontent; cracked down on dissent, and was dragging Egypt towards a closed-minded theocracy.
(6) Within this apocalyptic tradition, Cohn identified the Flagellants who massacred the Jews of Frankfurt in 1349; the widespread heresy of the Free Spirit; the 16th-century Anabaptist theocracy of Münster (though some have criticised Cohn's account of this extraordinary event as lurid); the Bohemian Hussites; the instigators of the German peasants' war; and the Ranters of the English civil war.
(7) Antediluvian theocracy has had its day, and thinking Talibs know it.
(8) Watching from the front row in late August was Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei , in what was seen as an endorsement from the ruling theocracy that had once tried to stamp out all music as a violation of Islamic values.
(9) The Dalai Lama himself has managed the very difficult transition of Tibetan exile politics from a theocracy towards something very much like a proper democracy.
(10) Our agenda is to preserve and protect the constitution and do everything within the law to prevent them establishing a theocracy over us," said Edwin Kagin, national legal director of American Atheists .
(11) The great thinkers of the Enlightenment proposed that if society was to get beyond theocracy, anarchy or despotism, then it had to be underwritten by such a social contract.
(12) Ahrar al-Sham Formed by hardliners with Muslim Brotherhood links, who aim to establish a Sunni theocracy in Syria, Ahrar al-Sham fought with Nusra when it was still part of al-Qaida, but rejects international jihad itself.
(13) Audiences are surprised because Switzerland is supposedly full of People Like Us: it’s an affluent western European nation, not a sand-blasted theocracy or a dirt-poor African dictatorship.
(14) In recent years a more assertive Iran, run by a Shia Muslim theocracy, has mounted multiple challenges to Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia’s role as guardian and leader of the Islamic world.
(15) Iran is a proud nation of 80 million mostly Muslim people, one of many Asian and African states struggling between theocracy and democracy, tradition and modernity.
(16) For years, detractors have accused the Dalai Lama of scheming to retake Tibet and restore the old feudal theocracy, in spite of his public statements in favour of secular, democratic government.
(17) A year after the elections Iran is still an illiberal theocracy, it is no closer to halting its uranium enrichment program, it still plays king maker in Iraq, and the fate of the Strait of Hormuz still rests on a hair trigger.
(18) The scale of his victory provides a strong platform to challenge hardliners who still hold ultimate control in a Iran’s unwieldy hybrid of theocracy and democracy.
(19) Iranian dissidents, who oppose the theocracy's drive to get the bomb, turned up to protest.
(20) Like any theocracy, this one would select a few passages from the Bible to justify its actions, and it would lean heavily towards the Old Testament, not towards the New.