Quotes About Wealth

The less you eat, drink and buy books the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.

Le travailleur tombe dans le paupérisme, et le paupérisme s'accroît plus rapidement encore que la population et la richesse

The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society.

En nuestra sociedad los que trabajan no adquieren y los que adquieren no trabajan.

La riqueza de las sociedades en las que domina el modo de producción capitalista se presenta como un enorme cúmulo de mercancías, y la mercancía individual como la forma elemental de esa riqueza

The medieval proverb nulle terre sans seigneur [There is no land without its lord. — Ed.] is thereby replaced by that other proverb, l'argent n'a pas de maître [Money knows no master. — Ed.], wherein is expressed the complete domination of dead matter over man.

If money, according to Augier, comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

Economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. … what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

Indudablemente, la voluntad del capitalista consiste en embolsarse lo más que pueda. Y lo que hay que hacer no es discurrir acerca de lo que quiere, sino investigar su poder, los límites de este poder y el carácter de estos límites.

La burguesía … ha creado fuerzas productivas mucho más colosales y masivas que todas las pasadas generaciones juntas, …¿Cuál de los pasados siglos pudo sospechar siquiera que en el seno del trabajo social dormitasen tantas y tales fuerzas productivas?

capital collapses because it cannot exist alongside shared knowledge

Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labor.

He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.

the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.

Tracy thought she must be missing something, it felt like the same world as ever to her. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, kids everywhere falling through the cracks. The Victorians would have recognized it. People just watched a lot more TV and found celebrities interesting, that was all that was different.

The man who is rich in fancy thinks that his wagon is already built; poor fool, he does not know that there are a hundred timbers to a wagon.

False shame accompanies a man that is poor, shame that either harms a man greatly or profits him; shame is with poverty, but confidence with wealth.

The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.

'Every man a king' - that's my slogan.

Riches ennoble a man's circumstances, but not himself.

Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.