Quotes About Wealth

The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of all that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed - of a true independence. That is the real gift of America, not its fabled wealth and prosperity.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.

When you get rid of the estate tax," he (Warren Buffet) said, "you're basically handing over command of the country's resources to people who didn't earn it. It's like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the children of all the winners at the 2000 Games.

the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy ... betrays a poverty of ambition.

Money is not the only answer, but it makes a difference.

In 1980, the average CEO made forty-two times what an average hourly worker took home. By 2005, the ratio was 262 to 1.

the financial markets had helped accelerate the offshoring of jobs and the concentration of wealth in a handful of cities and economic sectors

When you get rid of the estate tax," he said, "you're basically handing over command of the country's resources to people who didn't earn it. It's like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the children of all the winners at the 2000 Games.

Between 1971 and 2001, while the median wage and salary income of the average worker showed literally no gain, the income of the top hundredth of a percent went up almost 500 percent.

Il denaro non è l'unica risposta, ma fa la differenza.

I do think at a certain point you've made enough money.

A wealthy, famous, five-foot-six, 140-pound, fifty-eight-year-old white Harvard professor who walked with a cane because of a childhood leg injury would not have been handcuffed and taken down to the station merely for being rude to a cop who'd forced him to produce some form of identification while standing on his own damn property.

like most wealthy Americans, almost all his income came from dividends and capital gains, investment income that since 2003 has been taxed at only 15 percent.

Later, you add to that definition: making money. How much money can you make?

Still, there was no getting around the fact that many of the people most culpable for the nation's economic woes remained fabulously wealthy and had avoided prosecution mainly because the laws as written deemed epic recklessness and dishonesty in the boardroom or on the trading floor less blameworthy than the actions of a teenage shoplifter.

At the time, few people had or felt the need for private health insurance. Most Americans paid their doctors visit by visit, but the field of medicine was quickly growing more sophisticated, and as more diagnostic tests and surgeries became available, the attendant costs began to rise, tying health more explicitly to wealth. Both the United Kingdom and Germany had addressed similar issues by instituting national health insurance systems, and other European nations would eventually follow suit.

It seems that politics is becoming a millionaire's club...a poor man just doesn't have a chance these days. It is true that America is becoming more and more anti-revolutionary and anti-democratic--but as long as Americans feel such awe and envy for wealth and power, men like Scranton have a tremendous glamour over any other person no matter how well qualified or intelligent. [1962]

Si hablamos en términos globales, el mayor obstáculo para la felicidad es la pobreza. Las encuestas sobre felicidad, hasta donde podemos confiar en ellas, muestran siempre que los países más felices del mundo suelen ser los más ricos. Estados Unidos está en el puesto 23 y el Reino Unido en el 41, por ejemplo; mientras que la India aparece en el nada halagüeño puesto 125 (de 178 países).

Political power, too, is concentrated within the top 20 percent, since its members are far more likely than the poor—or even the middle class—to discern the all-too-tiny distinctions between candidates that can make it seem worthwhile to contribute, participate, and vote.

Some odd optical property of our highly polarized and unequal society makes the poor almost invisible to their economic superiors.

A wealthy Yale-educated attorney and publisher with an interest in wine-tasting, Rusher is one of the New Right's most enthusiastic proponents of working-class populism.

Las habitaciones de hotel de 34.000 dólares por noche, la hamburguesa cubierta de polvo de oro, que ofrecía Richard Nouveau en el Wall Street Burger Shoppe por 175 dólares, el martini de 10.000 dólares del hotel Algonquin, que se servía con un diamante en la copa…

But apparently you don't need dot-com wealth to ruin an area for its low-income residents. The Pioneer Press quotes Secretary of HUD Andrew Cuomo ruing the cruel irony that prosperity is shrinking the stock of affordable housing nationwide: The stronger the economy, the stronger the upward pressure on rents.