Quotes About Wealth

things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe. Who paid the expenses of the noble enterprise I don't know; but the uncle of our manager was leader of that lot.

Hadn't I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together?

O Crassus, tell us, For thou dost know, what is the taste of gold?

Money is the most universal incitement of human misery.—Gibbon's Decline and Fall.

We were not rich, but my parents had adjusted their lifestyle to their incomes—and in the end that is a big part of the battle.

If economic power in a country becomes too unevenly distributed, political consequences will follow. While we typically think of the rule of law as being designed to protect the weak against the strong, and ordinary citizens against the privileged, those with wealth will use their political power to shape the rule of law to provide a framework within which they can exploit others.9

in today's America the proud claim of "justice for all" is being replaced by the more modest claim of "justice for those who can afford it.

aunque la economía de goteo hacia abajo no funciona, la economía de goteo hacia arriba sí puede funcionar: todo el mundo —incluso los de arriba— podría beneficiarse dando más a los de abajo y a los de en medio.

University of California professor Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, and Stefanie Stantcheva of the MIT Department of Economics, carefully taking into account the incentive effects of higher taxation and the societal benefits of reducing inequality, have estimated that the tax rate at the top should be around 70 percent—what it was before President Reagan started his campaign for the rich.68 But

La desigualdad es una opción, no algo inevitable.

What's worrying is that those in the 1 percent, in attempting to claim for themselves an unjust proportion of the benefits of this system, may be willing to destroy the system itself to hold on to what they have. This

Nuestra economía no ha funcionado bien para vastas porciones del país, pero entretanto ha sido inmensamente gratificante para los que están en la cúpula. Sin duda, esta brecha cada vez más profunda es la raíz del actual dilema del país y el de muchos otros países avanzados.

Tercero, no hay que confundir la riqueza de una nación con la riqueza de determinados individuos en ese país.

Los legisladores deberían centrarse siempre en cualquier mercado con rentas excesivas, pues son un indicador de que la economía podría funcionar más eficientemente: en realidad, la explotación inherente a estas termina debilitando la economía. Una batalla exitosa contra la búsqueda de renta redunda en redirigir los recursos hacia la creación de riqueza.

La verdadera riqueza de una nación se mide por su capacidad de brindar, de una forma sostenida, altos niveles de vida a todos sus ciudadanos.

Al agravar los efectos de la desigualdad de oportunidades educativas, junto con unos impuestos de sucesiones demasiado bajos, Estados Unidos está creando día a día una plutocracia hereditaria.

Lograr una sociedad más justa requiere de igualdad de oportunidades, pero a la vez esta requiere de mayor igualdad de ingresos y riqueza.

Suppose someone were to describe a small country that provided free education through university for all of its citizens, transportation for schoolchildren, and free health care - including heart surgery - for all. You might suspect that a country is either phenomenally rich or on the fast track to fiscal crisis.

Economists have a name for these activities: they call them rent seeking, getting income not as a reward to creating wealth but by grabbing a larger share of the wealth that would otherwise have been produced without their effort. (We'll give a fuller definition of the concept of rent seeking

To put it baldly, there are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others.

The wealth given to the elites and to the bankers seemed to arise out of their ability and willingness to take advantage of others. One

misshapen economy creates misshapen individuals and a misshapen society

we have a system that has been working overtime to move money from the bottom and middle to the top, but the system is so inefficient that the gains to the top are far less than the losses to the middle and bottom.

Some thirty years ago, the top 1 percent of income earners received only 12 percent of the nation's income.13