Quotes About Wealth

When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke's commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.

Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets, the poorer it thinks itself. All

Only twenty-six British universities have total endowments greater than the amount given annually to the Ohio State University football team. I

The richer the country, the more allergies its citizens get.

Baron Rothschild, whose obsessive quest for rare species led to the annihilation of several.

I am so well prepared financially that I have money in a range of currencies that no longer exist. I

Isn't it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich?

Other than in churches and a few wealthy homes, window glass was a rarity well into the 1600s. Eleanor Godfrey, in her history of glass-making, notes how in 1590 an alderman in Doncaster left his house to his wife but the windows to his son. The owners of Alnwick Castle from the same period always had their windows taken out and stored when they were away to minimize the risk of breakage.

The low doors of so many old European houses, on which those of us who are absentminded tend to crack our heads, are low not because people were shorter and required less headroom in former times, as is commonly supposed. People in the distant past were not in fact all that small. Doors were small for the same reason windows were small: they were expensive.

On even the most modest properties, a good, well-cut lawn became the ideal. For one thing, it was a way of announcing to the world that the householder was prosperous enough that he didn't need to use the space to grow vegetables for his dinner table.

Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what.

By comparison, the practice of one Frank Huntington Beebe of keeping two mansions side by side—one to live in, one to decorate over and over—seems admirably restrained.

Blenheim Palace, home of the Dukes of Marlborough, whose achievements over the last eleven generations could be inscribed with a Sharpie on the side of a peanut.

So Whitney's gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War.

Until as late as the early 1950s a round-trip aeroplane ticket from Australia to England cost as much as a three-bedroom suburban home in Melbourne or Sydney.

Happiness is a good bank account, a good cook and a good digestion. —jean-jacques rousseau

At one time he personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandfather Warren Delano made much of the family's fortune by trading opium, a fact that the Roosevelt family has never exactly crowed about.

BEFORE HE CAME INTO a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life.

Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary.

Whitemarsh Hall in Philadelphia

She always said, You boys aren't rich enough to afford not to pay attention.

They intended to use America's absence from the world scene to overthrow the Saudi king, expropriate the wealth of his branch of the royal family and its supporters, reconcile with Iran and Syria, and establish a modern technocratic caliphate using science and technology to raise the standing of the Muslim world to heights not seen in a thousand years.

You boys aren't rich enough to afford not to pay attention.