Quotes About Wealth

Every man measures his own greed.

cuando decidió no emigrar y quedarse aquí, en Lima la Horrible, convencido de que podría organizar su vida de manera que, aunque por razones de trabajo alimenticio tuviera que pasar muchas horas del día sumido en el mundanal ruido de los peruanos de clase alta, viviría de verdad en ese enclave puro, bello, elevado, hecho de cosas sublimes, que él se fabricaría como alternativa a la coyunda cotidiana.

Maar wie maakte zich druk om geld als je het afwoog tegen geluk?

el dinero abre todas las puertas y que ni siquiera los prejuicios raciales se le resisten

Resultó desconcertante para muchos lectores de La riqueza de las naciones descubrir que no es el altruismo ni la caridad, sino más bien el egoísmo, el motor del progreso:

Ninguna sociedad puede ser próspera y feliz si la mayoría de sus miembros son pobres y miserables»

Ninguna sociedad puede ser próspera y feliz si la mayoría de sus miembros son pobres y miserables

JLB: El lujo me parece una vulgaridad.

La igualdad ante la ley y la igualdad de oportunidades no significan la igualdad en los ingresos y en la renta

Repartir la pobreza no trae riqueza a nadie y sólo contribuye a universalizar la pobreza.

We are at the cross-ways. If we stand on in the old happy-go-lucky way, the richer classes ever growing in wealth and in number, and ever declining in responsibility, the very poor remaining plunged or plunging even deeper into helpless, hopeless misery, then I think there is nothing before us but savage strife between class and class. —WINSTON CHURCHILL, SPEECH AT LEICESTER, 1909

It's hard, in America, not to equate 'happiness' with 'things'.

she was flighty and poor, a French studies major who quoted Simone de Beauvoir. She wiped her runny nose on her coat sleeve when it was snowing, stuck her head out of car windows the way dogs do, the wind fireworking her hair. That woman was gone now. Not that it was her fault. Vast fortunes did that to people. It took them to the cleaners, cruelly starched and steam-pressed them so all their raw edges, all the dirt and hunger and guileless laughter, were ironed out. Few survived real money.

It was astounding how a woman, when she struck marital gold, procured not just a new wardrobe and new friends but a new voice straight out of a 1930s gramophone (brittle, mono-stereo) and a vocabulary that reliably included laze, season, and terribly sorry.

if my dad put half the energy he did into cutting corners into just driving around the corner, he'd be a billionaire.

Vast fortunes did that to people. It took them to the cleaners, cruelly starched and steam-pressed them so all their raw edges, all the dirt and hunger and guileless laughter, were ironed out. Few survived real money.

Job learned about the vanity of this world by losing it all; the Teacher {Qoheleth} saw it by having it all. (The Message of the Old Testament, p. 536)

The unwillingness of the rich guy to take advantage of being a rich guy for fear of looking like a rich guy was a chain of logic too Ouroborosian to ponder for too long.

The rich died, too, disappointing all those who thought that somehow they didn't. Peter Lakes had no illusions about mortality. He knew that it made everyone perfectly equal, and that the treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter, and love. The wealthy could not buy these things. On the contrary they were for the taking.

The first was that it was almost impossible to get. The second, that, once you had it, it was almost impossible to keep. The third, that these laws applied only to each individual but not to anyone else. In other words, though money was impossible to get and impossible to keep, for everyone else it flowed in by the bucketful and stayed forever.

Your materialism will make you suffer terribly not only at the end but also on the way.

Better to have a font of money in middle age than when you're young. Middle age is the time when you'll need it and appreciate it. I'll never appreciate it. I've been trained out of it. I don't want money. I want much more. I want what rarely happens. I want what people are afraid even to imagine. Like what? Resurrection, redemption, love.

It would be folly to assume that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than an American Rockefeller.

Viking is a term—thought to have its root in the old Norse vika, meaning "to go off"—for Scandinavians who left their native land to seek wealth in commerce.