WEALTH QUOTES III
quotations about wealth
Jesus and the apostles nowhere speak of wealth as a thing to be prayed for. They nowhere characterize wealth as a blessing, or the accumulation of it, by enterprise and industry, as praiseworthy. The new dispensation nowhere promises either riches or long life to the righteous: it promises eternal life and treasures in heaven. The "poverty" which Jesus calls "blessed" consists, not in penury and the lack of the necessaries of life, but in abundance or non-abundance, with a knowledge that the abundance, if there be abundance, is the gratuitious gift of God; and also the knowledge, if there be non-abundance, that "whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth."
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic, and Financial Fragments
There is no road to wealth so easy and respectable as that of matrimony.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
Doctor Thorne
The wealthy have nothing left except money.
GEORGE ADE
"The Fable of the Misdirected Sympathy and the Come-Back of the Proud Steam-Fitter", True Bills
There are a thousand ways to Wealth, but only one way to Heaven.
JOHN LOCKE
Letters on Toleration
Poor is the man who can boast of nothing more than gold.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
As large trees are not the most productive, neither are wealthy men the most liberal.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Jars neither of wine nor of water shall fail in the houses of the rich.
AESCHYLUS
fragment, Kabeiroi
Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. And it will leave you unfulfilled.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, July 12, 2006
The poor know well what wealth can do--
The rich their happiest chances miss;
We sit too close to grasp the view,
Or stand too far to feel the bliss.
CAROLINE SPENCER
"Outside"
Small aid is wealth for daily gladness; once a man be done with hunger, rich and poor are all as one.
EURIPIDES
Electra
There's a common misconception that wealth is a fixed pie, and that therefore for one person to have a lot of wealth requires somebody else to have less (the narrative often goes that wealthy people stole their wealth from poor and middle class people) ... [but] wealth can grow, so that even if someone's percentage of the pie remains the same, they will benefit from that individual slice getting bigger.
IAN TARTT
"Bernie Sanders on the Koch Brothers and Libertarian Ideas", The Libertarian Republic, April 18, 2017
Nothing keeps longer than a middling fortune, and nothing melts away sooner than a large one.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Gifts of Fortune", Les Caractères
While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.
HOWARD ZINN
A People's History of the United States
Wealth--the most excellent of all gods.
ARISTOPHANES
Plutus
Some people aren't meant to be rich. It's like when Babe Ruth was the greatest home run hitter. There had never been anybody like him, and his teammates would ask, "Babe, Babe, how do you hit the long ball?" And he'd say, "I don't know, man. I just swing at it." I see it like that. It's just something you have, something you're born with. Many people don't have the ability to be rich, because they're too lazy or they don't have the desire or the stick-to-itiveness. It's a talent. Some people have a talent for piano. Some people have a talent for raising a family. Some people have a talent for golf. I just happen to have a talent for making money.
DONALD TRUMP
Playboy, October 2004
To remain secure and prosperous themselves, wealthy nations must extend the kind of cooperation to the less fortunate members that will inspire hope, confidence and progress. A rich nation can for a time, without noticeable damage to itself, pursue a course of self- indulgence, making its single goal the material ease and comfort of its own citizens--thus repudiating its own spiritual and material stake in a peaceful and prosperous society of nations. But the enmities it will incur, the isolation into which it will descend, and the internal moral and physical softness that will be engendered, will, in the long term, bring it to disaster.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
State of the Union Address, January 7, 1960
Some people who have a lot of money like to show it off. They buy large houses, expensive cars, and all the toys you can imagine. But others keep their affluence on the down low. They don't look any different from anyone else, but they have some serious cash stashed away. These folks have what is known as stealth wealth. They are worth way more than they appear to be, and they often manage to retire early or follow their dreams in some other way that surprises the people around them -- people who never realized they had that kind of money.
SARAH WINFREY
"5 Reasons Stealth Wealth Is the Best Wealth", WiseBread, March 24, 2017
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
"The Rich Boy"
As the cream abandons the milk from which it took its life, and rises to the top and rides there, so men, because they are richer than those around about them, separate themselves, and all mankind below them they regard as skim milk.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Behind the deceptive words designed to entice people into supporting violence -- words like democracy, freedom, self-defense, national security -- there is the reality of enormous wealth in the hands of a few, while billions of people in the world are hungry, sick, homeless.
HOWARD ZINN
preface, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train