Quotes About Wealth

The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.

Salvador Dali and fifty cents will get you a cup of clock melt.

The accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life and, by extension, a relationship with the divine.

The economic world, the world of the equities markets, just seemed like a perfect foil, the ideal backdrop against which to contrast this story about legendary amphibians from outer space, because everything these days is all about money. In this book (Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas) I'm hoping to illustrate that there not only are far more important things than money, but there are far more interesting things. (from NPR Interviews edited by Robert Siegel)

War is capitalism with the gloves off

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty. Too much money had a whiff of evil and somebody else's blood.

Well, you know, doctors need to work on the dead poor so they can help the live rich.

What does 'poor' mean? No television?" Steve raised his eyebrows. "It means no money," said Bride. "Same thing," he answered. "No money, no television." "Means no washing machine, no fridge, no bathroom, no money!" "Money get you out of that Jaguar? Money save your ass?

The price of wealth, historically, has been blood, annihilation, death, and despair.

Let me tell you right now the one important thing you'll ever need to know: Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you'll own yourself and other people too.

Plenty in a world of excess and attending greed, which tilts resources to the rich and forces others to envy, is an almost obscene feature of a contemporary paradise.

Plenty in a world of excess and attending greed, which tilts resources to the rich and forces others to envy, is an almost obscene feature of a contemporary paradise. In this world of outrageous, shameless wealth squatting, hulking, preening before the dispossessed, the very idea of "plenty" as Utopian ought to make us tremble. Plenty should not be understood as a paradise-only state, but as normal, everyday, humane life.

I looked down and realized I had champagne, Diet Coke, red wine, Coors Light, bottled water, and hot tea on my tray all at once. The rich, I realized, were different from you and me only in their unlimited access to beverages. For a moment I was intensely happy.

Blessed are the generous, for they know their riches belong to others. Blessed

Keynes himself had taken the view that capitalism would not survive if its workings were reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means to get wealthier. It was

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? Perhaps we might start by reminding ourselves and our children that it wasn't always thus.

otherwise—to deny distinctions of class or wealth or influence—is just a way to promote one set of interests above another.

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears 'natural' today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor.

If we compare the gap separating rich and poor, whether measured by overall assets or annual income, we find that in every continental European country as well as in Great Britain and the US, the gap shrank dramatically in the generation following 1945.

All around us we see a level of individual wealth unequaled since the early years of the 20th century.

financial transactions have displaced the production of goods or services as the source of private fortunes, distorting the value we place upon different kinds of economic activity.