Quotes About Wealth

Our foreign-exchange reserves when I took over were no more than a billion dollars; that is, roughly equal to two weeks' imports.

New York has arguably become the quintessential 1 percent city, a city that has been so given over to the rich that you now have to be rich to live here. Or not live here: New York's also a preferred destination for foreign money spent on vast, lifeless apartments in the sky that are occupied a couple of weeks a year at most.

These are the multinationals, like General Motors and Nestle; these are the big industrial groups that weigh, on the monetary scale, much more than big countries like Egypt.

I'm a computer guy, and one of the things I did with the good fortune that 'Presumed Innocent' brought me was to buy one of the very first laptop computers. It weighed about eight and a half pounds, by the way.

High levels of economic inequality lead to imbalances in political power, as those at the top use their economic weight to shape our politics in ways that give them more economic power.

We need to make sure that everyone's pulling their weight and doing their fair share. Canadians get that, including the wealthy Canadians I talk to.

This country is going to implode, or put another way, it's going to get crushed under the weight of poverty. You can't have one percent of the people who own and control more wealth than the other 90 percent of the population.

All my life, Americans have been accustomed to thinking of theirs as 'the richest, freest' country in the world. By most measurements, it was long a contender for that honor, and - among the larger countries, if equal weight were given to wealth and indices of freedom - probably did deserve to be so described.

I tell people I went to 'Beverly Hills 90210' for high school, and everyone associates it with rich people, but you don't have to be a rich kid to go there. It was weird - my parents didn't raise me like that.

You can almost judge how screwed up somebody is by the kind of toilet paper they use. Go in any rich house and it's some weird coloured embossed stuff.

It was very weird when my classmates were getting hundred-thousand-dollar cars because that was so not my reality.

The weirdest place someone has asked me for advice was at a party where there were a lot of A-list celebrities and super-wealthy people. There were people in the middle of mingling asking for investment advice, and I'm like, 'Hey, I'm just here to dance. I'm here to have fun!'

At Trinity College there was a coterie of the poshest of the posh, people you didn't ever see, they were so posh. They went to each other's rooms and, at weekends, each other's estates. I preferred to be with the weirdo bunch of raggle-taggle thesps.

Basically, I chose not to identify with being broke any longer. I realized I deserved a beautiful life, and abundance was something that I needed to welcome into my life.

I hate the idea of people nicking my stuff, but in all honesty, I'm pretty well off. If a genuinely desperate man on his last gasp nicks my coat from the pub on a freezing night, well, he's welcome to it. It'll change his life. Mine's only inconvenienced by having to buy another one.

Sovereign wealth fund money should be welcomed. The only way not to welcome that money is when it's politically driven.

After being on 'Oprah' for a couple of months, I got my first royalty check for $1,478,392.17. I will never forget it. At the height of my career, I made $3.3 million. Unbelievable. From welfare in the projects to $3.3 million.

I came from nothing. I came from the projects and welfare and ended up a millionaire with no frame of reference. I was bound to hit a wall sooner or later.

Having grown up a trailer park kid on welfare and food stamps, becoming jaded is impossible, although now I make a good living, which I'm not ashamed of; when you've been poor, it never leaves you.

I lived in a low-income Black community, grew up with kids on welfare and with Black folks driving Cadillacs, going to private schools and everything in between. My literal biological aunties are deeply religious. I got it all.

Libertarians know that a free country has nothing to fear from anyone coming in or going out - while a welfare state is scared to death of poor people coming in and rich people getting out.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

Greed is the inventor of injustice as well as the current enforcer.

Capitalism does a number of things very well: it helps create an entrepreneurial spirit; it gets people motivated to come up with new ideas, and that's a good thing.