Quotes About Wealth

Money is the root of all evil.' Then we hear, 'A fool and his money are soon parted.' What are they talking about? If money is so evil, shouldn't it be, 'A wise man and his money are soon parted'? And another thing, how does a fool get money in the first place? I know some fools who have a lot of money, but they won't tell me how they got it, and I won't tell them.

Little-known fact: When the stock exchange closes, the guy who comes out on the balcony with that big hammer slams it on the head of the person who lost the most money that day.

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.

Keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee. Light gains make heavy purses.

The reason why we have never found measure of wealth. We never sought it.

As for time, all men have it in abundance.

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.

We have come a long way from sod huts and muddy boots to an economy that produces billions of dollars' worth of soap. And we may be learning what Mark Twain meant: "Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

Almost everyone will be nice to almost everyone, using money taken from a few.

John Cochrane notes: "Rich people mostly give away or reinvest their wealth. It's hard to see just how this is a problem.…Look at Versailles. Nobody, not even Bill Gates, lives like Marie Antoinette. And nobody in the US lives like her peasants.

At this point, the Grumpy Economist becomes the Incredulous Economist: "If the central problem is rent-seeking, abuse of the power of the state to deliver economic goods to the wealthy and politically powerful, how in the world is more government the answer?

Money is the sinews of love, as of war.

There's no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.

The Mediterranean was, before the northern European industrial revolution, one of the wealthiest regions in the world. Divisions between Muslim North Africa and Christian southern Europe were contained, if not always peacefully. The

There is a quote attributed to Honoré de Balzac: behind every great fortune there is a great crime.

Money is not a magic wand but a measuring stick, not wealth but a gauge of it.

Midas's error was to mistake gold, wealth's monetary measure, for wealth itself. But wealth is not a thing or a random sequence. It is inextricably rooted in hard won knowledge over extended time.

The test distills into a few questions: What is your attitude toward people who surpass you in the creation of wealth or in other accomplishments? Do you aspire to equal their excellence, or does it make you seethe? Do you admire and celebrate exceptional achievement, or do you impugn it and seek to tear it down?

Even though Jews are a tiny minority of less than a tenth of 1 percent of the world's people, they comprise perhaps a quarter of the world's paramount capitalists and entrepreneurs.

The key issue in economics is not aligning incentives with some putative public good but aligning knowledge with power. Business investments have both a financial and an epistemic yield. Capitalism catalytically joins the two. Capitalist economies grow because they award wealth to its creators, who have already proved that they can increase it. Their tests yield knowledge because they are falsifiable; they can be exposed as wrong. Businesses are subject to failure.

By merely foreswearing violence and taking advantage of their unique position contiguous with the world's most creative people, the Palestinians could be rich and happy.

The risk-bearing role of the rich cannot be performed so well by anyone else. The benefits of capitalism still depend on capitalists. The other groups on the pyramid of wealth should occasionally turn from the spectacles of consumption long enough to see the adventure on the frontiers of the economy above them - an adventure not without its note of nobility...

I know human nature. We might sacrifice a few, because we are stupid and hardwired for group survival. But we would never die in the thousands because a god wished it. Those kinds of numbers require material gains, like power, wealth, territory.