Quotes About Wealth

I think those who invest in mutual funds want someone else to do the thinking for them. But the fact that they can move the money around the family of mutual funds just through a phone call lets them feel that they can play tycoons.

Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How'd they get so rich? Because they're free.

If you're looking for the phony in American politics, you could do worse than follow the money.

Every time I get photographed, it's the legs. So I've insured them for a lot, for £5 million each. Is that enough?

You always hear the phrase, money doesn't buy you happiness. But I always in the back of my mind figured a lot of money will buy you a little bit of happiness. But it's not really true. I got a new car because the old one's lease expired.

Poor but happy is not a phrase invented by a poor person.

'Redistributing the wealth' - that phrase gets used so much that you almost get numb to it.

I've paid for more pianos in hotel lobbies than you can imagine.

I love the work of Matisse and Picasso, but I don't have enough millions to own one. And I don't really believe in owning art, anyway.

At the end of my life, is it better to say that I empowered people to make great stuff, or that I died with a net worth of $10 billion? Obviously I'm picking the former, although I would not mind both.

You can't run the economy on BMWs alone. If the average person is in a pickle, how do you have a healthy economy?

If someone's dumb enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture, I'm certainly not dumb enough to turn it down.

Matt Leinart's L.A. duplex looks more like a Chuck E. Cheese safe house than a millionaire jock's crash pad. There's the requisite leather couch and flat-screen television, but the rest of the ground floor is bare except for a pile of Nick Jr. DVDs, a high chair, and a SpongeBob SquarePants director's chair.

What's a good metaphor for a Harvard student? A talking, gold-plated pile of manure, wearing a fleece.

I got to the pinnacle of the sport for a reason and that's to make money. I didn't come here just to give handouts.

I always feel a bit trapped when a painting goes for millions of pounds and only one person can have it. If you can have that as well as a poster on every student's wall, then you're in a very enviable position. I'd like to do a Damien Hirst for £500 at some point.

There are plenty of millionaires who would pay millions to hang a Van Gogh painting on the wall, but hardly one that would have ever had the crazy nut over for dinner. I feel like the big companies are like that with musicians. They'll say, 'We love music! It's all about the music!' - but if a musician shows up at the door, they call security.

I think the most successful are the most paranoid. The first thing people do when they buy a mansion is they build the biggest wall you could possibly build around it. What happens is, now you become a target. If I go into the hood, I'm at a disadvantage. They could carry guns. I can't. They can hit me in the face. I can't.

For an acquisitive Wall Streeter, the money saved by choosing a practical car can be put toward the cost of some pricier means of mobility - like a plane.

The party on Wall Street never ends - while the rest of us pick up their tab and suffer the hangover.

You have friends, and they die. You have a disease, someone you care about has a disease, Wall Street people are scamming everyone, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer. That's what we're surrounded by all the time.

What you're seeing with Occupy Wall Street and the others are people who are unhappy and they're directing their unhappiness now toward Wall Street and toward those they think are doing too well in our society.

I like Burton Malkiel's 'A Random Walk Down Wall Street.' He comes to the same conclusion that I do - that indexing is the way. My 'Little Book of Common Sense Investing' says pretty much the same thing.

Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I've been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.