Quotes About Wealth

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves . . . Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.

The top 1 percent now makes eighty-one times what those in the bottom half do, when you compare average earnings. For American adults on the lower half of the income ladder—some 117 million of them—earnings haven't changed since the 1970s.

Today the United States has the most unequal society of all developed nations. America's level of inequality is comparable to that of Russia, China, Argentina, and the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Today the United States has the most unequal society of all developed nations.

We... have created a greater material wealth than any other society in the history of the human race. Yet we have managed to kill off millions of our population in an arrangement which we call war.

since men are equal and thus have the same wish for happiness, and since there is not enough wealth to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to secure the future enjoyment of what they have at present.

The having mode of existence, the attitude centered on property and profit, necessarily produces the desire—indeed the need—for power.

Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous.[3] Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.

Our education generally tries to train people to have knowledge as a possession, by and large commensurate with the amount of property or social prestige they are likely to have in later life.

Consumir es una forma de tener, y quizá la más importante en las ricas sociedades actuales. Consumir tiene cualidades ambiguas, alivia la angustia, porque lo que tiene el individuo no se lo puede quitar, pero también requiere consumir más, por que el consumo previo pierde su carácter satisfactorio. Los consumidores modernos pueden identificarse con la formula siguente: yo soy == lo que tengo y lo que consumo.

This attitude of buying, this religious expectation that there are endless things which we can get, and the almost orgastic pleasure in visualizing the wealth of new things you can buy, this is something which carries over in our attitude towards things other than new models. We have become consumers of everything, consumers of science, consumers of art, consumers of lectures, consumers of love, and the attitude is always the same.

Ich habe arm angefangen, ich war später ein reicher Mann, ich bin jetzt wieder ein armer Teufel, es spielt keine Rolle. Wie's kommt, wird's gefressen, Ob mich die Sonne auf meiner Terrasse in Leoni bescheint oder hier auf dem Kreuzberg, das ist mir so egal wie der Sonne.

Ich bin ein Wirtschaftler und erkläre Ihnen: Die Gegenwartskrise ohne eine vorherige Erneuerung des Geistes ökonomisch lösen zu wollen, ist Quacksalberei!

Machthunger und Geldgier sind Geschwister, aber mit mir sind sie nicht verwandt

Anything you can settle with money is cheap.

Ach, darling, why aren't we rich? We have such marvellous ideas of what to do with it. There are so many rich people who can do no better than go backwards and forwards to their banks and offices. That's why they are rich, of course, said I. If we were rich we certainly wouldn't be so for long.

Yes, I think bitterly, that's how it is with us, and with all poor people. They don't dare ask the price, but worry themselves dreadfully beforehand about it; but the others, for whom it is not important, they settle the price first as a matter of course.

The factory owners in Germany have grown wealthy;--dysentery dissolves our bowels.

Yes, I think bitterly, that's how it is with us, and with all poor people. They don't dare to ask the price, but worry themselves dreadfully beforehand about it; but the others, for whom it is not important, they settle the price first as a matter of course.

Burnham and Root became rich men. Not Pullman rich, not rich enough to be counted among the first rank of society alongside Potter Palmer and Philip Armour, or to have their wives' gowns described in the city's newspapers, but rich beyond anything either man had expected, enough so that each year Burnham bought a barrel of fine Madeira and aged it by shipping it twice around the world on slow freighters.

Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?

A battle followed, fought in true Gilded Age fashion with oblique snubs and poisonous courtesy.

His demand for fine things, especially those rendered in gold, was fed as well by a kind of institutional larceny.

All were wealthy and at the peaks of their careers, but all also bore the scars of nineteenth-century life, their pasts full of wrecked rail cars, fevers, and the premature deaths of loved ones.