Success Quote by Ralph A. Cram

Perfection, for Ralph Adams Cram, is never a democratic hobby. It is a sorting mechanism. The line makes a sly, almost architectural argument: if you truly chase the best, you end up building hierarchies as surely as you build buttresses. “Definite aristocracy” isn’t just nostalgia for titles; it’s a claim about standards. Perfection requires gatekeeping: trained judgment, disciplined labor, and institutions that can say no more often than yes.

Coming from an early 20th-century Gothic revivalist, that’s not incidental. Cram designed churches, campuses, and civic buildings meant to radiate moral seriousness through stone, proportion, and craft. In an America intoxicated with mass production and upward mobility, he’s arguing that great work can’t be crowdsourced into existence. It needs an elite - not necessarily of birth, but of formation: people steeped in tradition, technique, and a philosophy of restraint.

The subtext is a critique of modernity’s flattening impulse. If everything is “good enough,” nothing is allowed to be great. By pairing aristocracy with “noble philosophy,” “august civil polity,” and “great art,” Cram treats excellence as a civic project, not a private indulgence. The sting is that perfection demands inequality of outcome: some ideas, buildings, and behaviors are simply higher in the order of things.

It’s an appealing argument if you’re worried about cultural decline; it’s also a warning label. Once you sanctify “perfection,” you risk confusing cultivated taste with moral authority - and turning aesthetic preference into a political theory.