Quotes About Wealth

collecting 10 per cent on high incomes and lower rates on lower incomes constituted undue discrimination against wealth.

The income-tax law in toto has virtually no defenders, even though most fair-minded students of the subject agree that its effect over the half century that it has been in force has been to bring about a huge and healthy redistribution of wealth.

And then, to top off the joke, if that is what it is, there are the people with more income than anyone else who pay less tax than anyone else—that is, those with annual incomes of a million dollars or more who manage to find perfectly legal ways of paying no income tax at all.

In the United States it is comparatively easy to raise tax rates and to introduce tax-avoidance devices, and it is comparatively hard to lower tax rates and to eliminate tax-avoidance devices.

Nathan Greene, special counsel to Lazard Frères, who was on the board for a while. Greene was a kind of business father confessor to me. I remember his saying, 'You think you'll make your pile and then be independent. My friend, in Wall Street you don't just win your independence at one stroke. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, you have to win your independence over again every day.' I found that he was right about that.

Most nineteenth-century American fortunes were enlarged by, if they were not actually founded on, the practice of insider trading,

acquiring money for its own sake can become an addiction if you're not careful—

After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy.

Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland.

He who bestows his goods upon the poor shall have as much again, and ten times more.

a man there was, though some did count him mad, the more he cast away the more he had.

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that. What is the West but a gigantic supermarket? And who really wants to die for a supermarket?

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.

Welcome to American capitalism. It's a great system, except that no one ever has enough.

He said afterwards that his ranch life had been the making of him. It had built him up and hardened him physically, and it had opened his eyes to the wealth of manly character among the plainsmen and cattlemen.

The relentless rules of humble arithmetic.

Your index fund should not be your manager's cash cow. It should be your own cash cow.

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. Learning is to the Studious, and Riches to the Careful. If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him.

The winning formula for success in investing is owning the entire stock market through an index fund, and then doing nothing. Just stay the course.

The greatest Enemies of the Equity investor are Expenses and Emotions.

It is simply not worth paying anybody more than 1 percent to manage your money. Above $1 million, you should be paying no more than 0.75 percent, and above $5 million, no more than 0.5 percent. . . . Your adviser should use index/passive stock funds wherever possible. If

The TIF is designed to be held for a lifetime.

Hear David Swensen, widely respected chief investment officer of the Yale University Endowment Fund. "A minuscule 4 percent of funds produce market-beating after-tax results with a scant 0.6 percent (annual) margin of gain. The 96 percent of funds that fail to meet or beat the Vanguard 500 Index Fund lose by a wealth-destroying margin of 4.8 percent per annum.

At the outset, investing is an act of faith, a willingness to postpone present consumption and save for the future.