Quotes About Wealth

THE AMERICAN ECONOMY HAS DAZZLED the world and its stock markets have created great riches, but the median American household is actually poorer in net worth today than it was in 2000.

Americans used to extol good-hearted Robin Hood, taking from the rich to give to the poor, and now we've stepped into the shoes of the Sheriff of Nottingham. When as a society we shrug at 30 million children living in low-income families in America, slashing their benefits while urging them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, we need to look in the mirror and have a good talk with ourselves.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937

BY EVEN A CONSERVATIVE COUNT, there are more than half a million homeless people in America at any one time, including nearly two hundred thousand living on the streets rather than in shelters. Homelessness has increased in the last forty years even as America has become much wealthier, because of a confluence of factors. After World

1266What matters to the children's well-being isn't so much the level of the family's wealth as whether it is controlled by the mother or the father.

The problem is that capitalists typically don't know how to divide the pie well and socialists typically don't know how to grow it well.

The gains in wealth and income have gone largely to a tiny share of the population, as is common knowledge by now. The people in the top 0.1 percent did fantastically well after 1980, those in the top 1 percent did very well, those below them in the top 10 percent enjoyed incomes growing at the same pace as the economy and those in the bottom 90 percent all lost ground—their incomes grew more slowly than the overall economy—during the last four decades.

Since the end of the twentieth century, the United States has witnessed an ominous and growing divergence among three trends that should ordinarily move together: wealth, output, and employment.

The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth.

As the costs of storing and retrieving information have collapsed, sharing expertise ought to be easy. But the cooperative approach based on openness and trust undermines the status of managers, whose wealth depends on the ability to create the impression that they have knowledge that their subordinates cannot be trusted to share.

Don't let someone spend money who never earned it.

She did move. Because she wanted to win. She wanted wealth and glory and whatever else it was that made people think that participating in this monstrosity that called itself the Game of Death would be somehow worth it. Celebrity, maybe. That seemed important to a lot of people, Rechs had noticed. As if it made everything—all things—better. Or right. She pulled hard on the trigger as she

Rich people defeat obesity through gene therapy. It's a fairly simple procedure, adjusting the metabolism. Poor people are stuck with diet and exercise.

I'm thinking of a legacy that I can be proud of and wealth that my grandchildren can use to go to college. So world domination - in terms of providing for my family - is absolutely my goal.

My goal in the beginning was to buy my mother a house. Now I realize, okay, if I really focus and become a key player in business, then I can build an empire.

Some wield money like a blunt instrument, bludgeoning their way to what they want. Others hold it up like a flashing light. Look! See how important I am! I prefer to employ it as a lubricant, to ease the wear and tear of daily living.

Money shouldn't frighten people. It's a tool. A very versatile one.

She leaned back, the very picture of ease and Anglisc wealth with her smooth honey hair, fine-draped dress, and gold winking at throat and wrist.

The scop's chant moved majestically from folk and fold to hearth and hall, wealth and wire, his rolling Anglics now transmuted into the language of flame, and gold and honour.

Without economic concerns the fool dies from boredom.

The two terms of the democratic alternative today—oppressive bureaucracy or repugnant plutocracy—are canceling each other out. Combining into a single term: opulent bureaucracy. At once repugnant and oppressive.

Only those who never moved a finger to acquire them should talk about money and power.

The most precise and shortest definition of a true civilization has been given by Trevelyan: A leisured class with large and learned libraries in their country seats.

Vulgarity is not a product of the people but a subproduct of bourgeois prosperity.