Quotes About Wealth

The terminal stages of what we call capitalism, as Marx grasped, is not capitalism at all. Corporations feast on taxpayer money.

Marx illuminated these contradictions within capitalism. He understood that the idea of capitalism—free trade, free markets, individualism, innovation, self-development—works only in the utopian mind of a true believer such as Alan Greenspan, never in reality. The hoarding of wealth by a tiny capitalist elite, Marx foresaw, along with the driving down of wages of workers, leaves populations unable to buy the products capitalism produces.

55 And it is the religion of capitalism, the maniacal quest for wealth at the expense of others, that turns human beings into beasts of prey.

Technological advancement and wealth are conflated in capitalism with human progress. All aspects of human existence that cannot be measured or quantified—beauty, truth, love, grief, the search for meaning, and the struggle with our own mortality—are ignored and ridiculed.

W. Bush's life is a case study in the insidious affirmative action for the rich.

The idiots know only one word—"more." They are unencumbered by common sense. They hoard wealth and resources until workers cannot make a living and the infrastructure collapses. They live in privileged compounds. They see the state as a projection of their vanity. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanov, Wilhelmine, Pahlavi, and Soviet dynasties crumbled because the whims and obsessions of ruling idiots were law.

But grabbing what you can, as John Ruskin said, isn't any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.

Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money.

The second means of building a fortune through theft was to take advantage of sky-high inflation rates.

Roldugin, who has been a friend of Putin since the 1970s, is said to be the person who introduced the Russian president to his former wife. He is the godfather of Putin's daughter Maria. These connections, rather than any evident business skill, allowed him to amass a tremendous fortune.

There has indeed been greed and theft aplenty in modern Russia, as the gaudy palaces and missile-armed yachts show. Much of this has been related to the president's friends, who have used corrupt contracts with state-owned firms to accumulate fortunes worth billions of dollars. The cost of this corruption is not only the money diverted from better uses, but also the investments that did not occur because potential entrepreneurs feared for the safety of their firms.

He demanded to know what I could learn from him, since my subject matter of Kentucky was unfathomably different from his—wealthy people on the East Coast. I became angry. Here was one more older man presenting himself as an obstacle.

Rather than leaving generous people on the short end of an unequal bargain, practices of generosity are actually likely instead to provide generous givers with essential goods in life—happiness, health, and purpose—which money and time themselves simply cannot buy. That is an empirical fact well worth knowing.

If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn't be enough to go around.

I detested that people who already had everything they could possibly want would step on others who had nothing. Would use them and crush them. I'd lived my life mainly in the streets and found out the hard way that people who could have helped just hurt us.

My life has never been my own. I've got all the money in the world, and nothing that I want. Until you. I want you. You're what I want for myself.

Money may not buy happiness, but it allows you to shop in better places for it.

The gap between rich and poor was not just one of wealth but of accountability.

How could you begin to explain London? A city once the color of tobacco and carrots, now chalky stone and angled steel, but vivid chimney pots can still be glimpsed between slivers of rain-specked glass. Nine billion pounds' worth of Christmas bonuses have just been spent in the city's square mile.

The urban middle class destroyed, the working poor exploited, the vulgar rich elevated to eminence, the underclass demonised, the wasteland of celebrity held in veneration.

This might have something to do with the fact that every half-decent flat in the area has been snapped up by war criminals shovelling their loose change into safe havens.

gap between rich and poor was not just one of wealth but of accountability

hate what I see around me, Arthur. The urban middle class destroyed, the working poor exploited, the vulgar rich elevated to eminence, the underclass demonised, the wasteland of celebrity held in veneration.

Yet, although many priests were extremely poor, the Church as an institution was not only very rich but also powerful. It paid no taxes, voluntarily contributing instead a grant to the state every five years, and, as the amount of this grant was decided in the quinquennial Church Assemblies, the clergy were able to exercise a considerable influence over the policies of the Government.