Quotes About Wealth

But I have wealth he cannot touch, Spoiler of kings! For I have tasted agony And worn joy's wings.

Artists shouldn't be made famous. You know... they're just ... as important as... um doctors, and priests ... or maybe not as important sometimes, and yet they have this huge aura of almost god-like quality about them, just because their craft makes a lot of money. And at the same time it is a forced importance you know, football stars and theatre stars It is man-made so the press can feed off it.

We dispute the arbitrary distribution of power and wealth, which is claimed as the natural order, but which is in fact not natural at all but rather artificially created and sustained by ancient privileges.

Class in England is no more determined by wealth than it is by occupation.

the greatest trick of kings is to fool the poor into thinking we have common cause with the rich simply because we live on the same bog. Then the poor get their heads split open in the battles they fight so the rich can keep their wine cellars well stocked.

There's money, and then there's class. The two are often separated.

There's money, and then there's class.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator. —Mary Harris "Mother" Jones

Try as he might, Gatsby remains outside the inner sanctum and nothing he can do will allow him full access. He will never be accepted by anyone but the nouveaux riches.

For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.

Governments have historically opted to tax what they could, rather than what they should, and it shows.

For the first time, ending human deprivation is becoming as much a question of tackling national distribution as of international redistribution, argues Andy Sumner, the expert who crunched the data on where the world's poorest people now live.

Back in Ancient Greece, when Xenophon first came up with the term economics, he described the practice of household management as an art. Following his lead, Aristotle distinguished economics from chrematistics, the art of acquiring wealth—in a distinction that seems to have been all but lost today.

There are now more than 2,000 billionaires living in 20 countries from the United States, China and Russia to Turkey, Thailand and Indonesia.93 An annual wealth tax levied at just 1.5 percent of their net worth would raise $74 billion each year: that alone would be enough to fill the funding gap to get every child into school and deliver essential health services in all low-income countries.

Out of all of these power relationships, when it comes to the workings of the economy, one in particular demands attention: the power of the wealthy to reshape the economy's rules in their favour.

First, change the goal. For over 70 years, economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century, a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.

the world has become extraordinarily unequal: as of 2015, the world's richest 1 percent now own more wealth than all the other 99 percent put together.

the last decades of the twentieth century, the focus shifted from measuring GNP to today's more familiar GDP, the income generated within a nation's borders.

Such an economy must help to bring everyone above the Doughnut's social foundation. To do so, however, it must alter the distribution not only of income but also of wealth, time and power.

Such redistributive policies can be life-changing for those who benefit from them. But they still may not get to the root of economic inequalities because they focus on redistributing income, not the wealth that generates it. Tackling inequality at root calls for democratising the ownership of wealth, argues the historian and economist Gar Alperovitz, because 'political-economic systems are largely defined by the way property is owned and controlled'.

The Selfish Society.

Aristotle who, recall from Chapter 1, distinguished economics, which he saw as the noble art of managing the household, from chrematistics, the pernicious art of accumulating wealth. 'Money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest,' he wrote in 350 BCE; '. . .of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.

There is a 'well-documented lifestyle effect', he notes, in which 'people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviourism is very real.

There is, however, a flip side to the market's power: it only values what is priced and only delivers to those who can pay.