WEALTH QUOTES III
quotations about wealth
You obviously don't know what an Old Man of the Sea great wealth is. It is not a fat purse and time to spend it. Its owner finds himself beset on every side, at every hour, wherever he goes, by persistent pleaders, like beggars in Bombay, each demanding that he invest or give away part of his wealth. He becomes suspicious of honest friendship--indeed honest friendship is rarely offered him; those who could have been his friends are too fastidious to be jostled by beggars, too proud to risk being mistaken for one.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Stranger in a Strange Land
As the cream abandons the milk from which it took its life, and rises to the top and rides there, so men, because they are richer than those around about them, separate themselves, and all mankind below them they regard as skim milk.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. And it will leave you unfulfilled.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, July 12, 2006
For having wealth and wherewithal to "do good", if you do it not, talk not of faith, for you have no faith in you.
LANCELOT ANDREWES
Ninety-six Sermons
Nothing keeps longer than a middling fortune, and nothing melts away sooner than a large one.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Gifts of Fortune", Les Caractères
Poor is the man who can boast of nothing more than gold.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
There has always been a display of wealth and always will be, until the depression comes, which it always does. And let me tell you, a display is a good thing. It shows people that you can be successful. It can show you a way of life.
DONALD TRUMP
interview, Playboy, March 1990
Titles, riches, and fine houses signify no more to the making of one man better than another, than the finer saddle to the making the better horse.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Wealth in activity--capital with all its friction--is far safer than invested wealth lying dead.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Wealth is useless on the day of wrath, but virtue saves from death.
PROVERBS 11:4
Behind the deceptive words designed to entice people into supporting violence -- words like democracy, freedom, self-defense, national security -- there is the reality of enormous wealth in the hands of a few, while billions of people in the world are hungry, sick, homeless.
HOWARD ZINN
preface, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
Many men want wealth--not a competence alone, but a five-story competence. Every thing subserves this; and religion they would like as a sort of lightning rod to their houses, to ward off, by and by, the bolts of divine wrath.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Any man can become rich who is base enough to keep a brothel, a gin palace, or a gambling house.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
It is doubtful if even experience of riches and success is as intense among those who have experienced nothing else as among those who have also experienced poverty and failure. There is little romance in wealth to those who have been born wealthy and whose families have been wealthy for generations.
ROBERT WILSON LYND
The Little Angel: A Book of Essays
Jars neither of wine nor of water shall fail in the houses of the rich.
AESCHYLUS
fragment, Kabeiroi
Nought is there in wealth
That serves as bulwark 'gainst the subtle stealth
Of Destiny and Doom.
AESCHYLUS
Agamemnon
The effect of the concentration of wealth is to yield concentration of power.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Requiem for the American Dream
There's a common misconception that wealth is a fixed pie, and that therefore for one person to have a lot of wealth requires somebody else to have less (the narrative often goes that wealthy people stole their wealth from poor and middle class people) ... [but] wealth can grow, so that even if someone's percentage of the pie remains the same, they will benefit from that individual slice getting bigger.
IAN TARTT
"Bernie Sanders on the Koch Brothers and Libertarian Ideas", The Libertarian Republic, April 18, 2017
Wealth which breeds idleness ... is only a sort of human oyster-bed, where heirs and heiresses are planted, to spend a contemptible life of slothfulness in growing plump and succulent for the grave-worm's banquet.
HORACE MANN
A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
Great wealth may be to its owner a blessing or a curse. Alas! I fear it is too often the latter. It hardens the heart, blunts the finer susceptibilities, and transforms into a fiend what under more favourable circumstances might have been a human being.
ARNOLD BENNETT
A Question of Sex