Quotes About Wealth

The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.

It is pure fatalism, undiluted by environmental variability. Good living, good medicine, healthy food, loving families or great riches can do nothing about. Your fate is in your genes. Like a pure Augustinian, you go to heaven by God's grace, not by good works. It reminds us that the genome, great book that it is, may give us the bleakest kind of self-knowledge: the knowledge of our destiny, not the kind of knowledge that you can do something about, but the curse of Tiresias.

Falling consumer prices is what enriches people (deflation of asset prices can ruin them, but that is because they are using asset prices to get them the wherewithal to purchase consumer items). And, once again, notice that the true metric of prosperity is time. If Cornelius Vanderbilt or Henry Ford not only moves you faster to where you want to go, but requires you to work fewer hours to earn the ticket price, then he has enriched you by granting you a dollop of free time.

Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.

Today, of Americans officially designated as 'poor', 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent a car and 70 per cent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these.

This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work.

And the good news is that there is no inevitable end to this process. The more people are drawn into the global division of labour, the more people can specialise and exchange, the wealthier we will all be. Moreover, along the way there is no reason we cannot solve the problems that beset us, of economic crashes, population explosions, climate change and terrorism, of poverty, AIDS, depression and obesity.

the rich are innately cleverer than the poor, which seems generally unlikely

So one way to raise your standard of living would be to lower somebody else's: buy a slave. That was indeed how people got rich for thousands of years. Yet

the true metric of prosperity is time.

If you can store the labour of others for future use, then you can spare yourself the time and the energy of working for your own immediate needs, which means you can invest in something new that will bring even greater reward.

although within a country rich people were generally happier than poor people, richer countries did not have happier citizens than poor countries. Since then the 'Easterlin paradox

Depending on whose estimate you choose, and how you correct for inflation, the average person alive in the world today earns in a year between ten and twenty times as much money, in real terms, as the average person earned in 1800. Or rather, he or she can afford ten or twenty times as many goods or services.

When they dreamed of turning iron and metal into gold, they called it alchemy. The much more far-fetched dream of turning bound sheafs of plain paper into fortunes, they call publishing

If individual merit considered in isolation were the source of wealth, then excluding more than half of the population from realizing their potential on account of their sex or skin color would be like sabotaging more than half of all factories or making more than half of all homes uninhabitable.

Those who seek happiness in pleasure, wealth, glory, power, and heroics are as naive as the child who tries to catch a rainbow and wear it as a coat. DILGO KHYENTSE RINPOCHE

Social class. Class remains our national awkward topic, usually mumbled over in academic diversity workshops; indeed, most people don't know how to talk about class without automatically coupling it with race. That's because we Americans are loath to recognize that the sky's-the-limit potential we take as our birthright comes at a price far beyond what many Americans--of any race--can afford to pay.

Money is for doing things, my love. Don't sit on it like a hen sits on an egg. It doesn't hatch. I should know. I've made enough of it.

There is a mistaken notion that wealth makes people content. It does the opposite, generally. It stirs a hunger in many - and no matter what they eat, they will never be full.

Stevie, how many stories - It's all one story, Stevie said, and the confidence in her voice surprised her. It was about money then, and it's about money now.

the famous Mr. Ellingham leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and bringing his large, suntanned hands together in a knot. Dottie had never seen anyone with a suntan in March before. This, more than anything, was the most powerful sign of Mr. Ellingham's wealth. He could have the sun itself.

But when we live, we believe that we have a right to everything in the universe - that everything is ours to touch.

Eton produced Society's Monsters - everyone knew that. Politicians, mostly, and occasionally people who ran banks and all the other institutions that stole the world's spoils for themselves.

Yale and Princeton would bite their ivy-covered knuckles in jealousy over the red and gold bricks; tree-lined paths; sculptures; twee, twisting pathways; and Gothic spires.