Quotes About Wealth

A historian who studied Boston tax lists in 1687 and 1771 found that in 1687 there were, out of a population of six thousand, about one thousand property owners, and that the top 5 percent—1 percent of the population—consisted of fifty rich individuals who had 25 percent of the wealth. By 1770, the top 1 percent of property owners owned 44 percent of the wealth.

The crisis was built into a system which was chaotic in its nature, in which only the very rich were secure. It was a system of periodic crisis - 1837, 1857, 1873 (and later: 1893, 1907, 1919, 1929) - that wiped out small businesses and brought cold, hunger, and death to working people while the fortunes of the Astors, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Morgans, kept growing through war and peace, crisis and recovery.

The problem of democracy in the post-Revolutionary society was not, however, the Constitutional limitations on voting. It lay deeper, beyond the Constitution, in the division of society into rich and poor. For, if some people had great wealth and great influence; if they had the land, the money, the newspapers, the church, the educational system -how could voting, however broad, cut into such power?

at the same time he was remarkably prescient in writing about what he calls the "99 percent" versus the "1 percent" years before the Occupy movement popularized these terms. (Interestingly, others claimed credit for this slogan—or were given credit for it—ignoring Howard's much earlier use of the terms in this book.)

Morgan had escaped military service in the Civil War by paying $300 to a substitute. So did John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Jay Gould, and James Mellon. Mellon's father had written to him that "a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable.

From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two classes—paupers and millionaires….

For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did not make the Spanish people richer. It gave their kings an edge in the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire more mercenary soldiers for their wars. They ended up losing those wars anyway, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, a starving population, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and a ruined peasant class.

the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with

By the middle of the nineteenth century the legal system had been reshaped to the advantage of men of commerce and industry at the expense of farmers, workers, consumers, and other less powerful groups within the society…. it actively promoted a legal redistribution of wealth against the weakest groups in the society.

In short, Beard said, the rich must, in their own interest, either control the government directly or control the laws by which government operates.

It was borrowed time anyway—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of a grand duc and the casualness of chorus girls.

Is it equitable that 99, rather 999, should suffer for the Extravagance or Grandeur of one, especially when it is considered that men frequently owe their Wealth to the impoverishment of their Neighbors?

If I want to be remembered for anything, it's for introducing a different way of thinking about the world, about war, about human rights, about equality, for getting more and more people to think that way. Also, for getting more people to realize that the power which rests so far in the hands of people with wealth and guns, that the power ultimately rests in people themselves and that they can use it. At certain points in history, they have used it.

Money, he said, is a terrible nuisance. But it's nice not to have to worry.

Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo.

It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.

Everybody has the same chance but you need to be rich...

Pero, en la realidad, somos nosotros, los ricos y muy educados blancos, los que andamos con el trasero al aire. Nos cubrimos por delante con alguna filosofía - cristiana, marxista, freudiana-física - , pero por detrás andamos al aire, a merced de los vientos de las circunstancias.

Aye,' McCann said ruefully, 'if yer rich yer just eccentric; if yer poor yer a nutcase an they stick ye in the bin.

Father is a school manqué ... He always wanted to write books. But he became rich instead, so is not allowed.

The French, I knew, were well ahead in this area, constructing gigantic palaces in the centre of cities which offer every luxury to travellers prepared to pay well to avoid any real contact with the place they were visiting.

It has been argued that in the eighteenth century a person with an annual income of 15,000 livres or more could be described as wealthy, and a person with an income of 30,000 livres or more could be described as extremely wealthy.1 If this benchmark is even roughly valid, it implies that when Voltaire became wealthy, after 1729, he became very, very, very wealthy.

I should spend the money quickly, Commander Bond.

Ever heard of "The House of Diamonds"?