What I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system... a set of qualities, however, whose merit lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, AND JUST AS ACHIEVABLE THROUGH SOCIALISM AS THROUGH ARISTOCRACY.

Letter to C.L. Moore (c. mid-October 1936), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 566