Selected wealth quotes

1. China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.

2. Those who thank God much are the truly wealthy. So our inner happiness depends not on what we experience but on the degree of our gratitude to God, whatever the experience.

3. These decrees of yours are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth.

4. Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

5. It would seem that the full meaning of the word marriage can never be known by those who, at their first outspring into life, are surrounded by all that money can give. It requires the single sitting-room, the single fire, the necessary little efforts of self-devotion, the inward declaration that some struggle shall be made for that other one.

6. The man who worships mere wealth is a snob.

7. There is no road to wealth so easy and respectable as that of matrimony.

8. Every man worships the dollar, and is down before his shrine from morning to night... Other men, the world over, worship regularly at the shrine with matins and vespers, nones and complines, and whatever other daily services may be known to the religious houses; but the New Yorker is always on his knees.

9. Come away; poverty's catching.

10. Money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.

11. Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.

12. The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.

13. In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.

14. Money is a strange business. People who haven't got it aim it strongly. People who have are full of troubles.

15. Wealthy men can't live in an island that is encircled by poverty. We all breathe the same air. We must give a chance to everyone, at least a basic chance.

16. I'd marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he'd be dead within a year.

17. You ride in a limousine the first time, it's a big thrill but after that it's just a stupid car.

18. Experience has shown that the trade of the East is the key to national wealth and influence.

19. Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.

20. If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare.

21. In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don't have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

22. When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'

23. The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.

24. If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

25. When you come to analyze the love of money which was the general impulse to effort in your day, you find that the dread of want and desire of luxury was but one of several motives which the pursuit of money represented; the others, and with many the more influential, being desire of power, of social position, and reputation for ability and success.

26. God only, who made us rich, can make us poor.

27. No radiant pearl which crested Fortune wears, No gem that twinkling hangs from Beauty's ears, Not the bright stars which Night's blue arch adorn, Nor rising suns that gild the vernal morn, Shine with such lustre as the tear that flows Down Virtue's manly cheek for others' woes.

28. If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?

29. Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.

30. The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.

31. He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

32. Isn't Hollywood a dump-in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

33. Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.

34. The Spanish voyager, as his caravel ploughed the adjacent seas, might give full scope to his imagination, and dream that beyond the long, low margin of forest which bounded his horizon lay hid a rich harvest for some future conqueror; perhaps a second Mexico with its royal palace and sacred pyramids, or another Cuzco with its temple of the Sun, encircled with a frieze of gold. Haunted by such visions, the ocean chivalry of Spain could not long stand idle.

35. They [the Reagan Administration] want to put street criminals in jail to make life safer for the business criminals. They're against street crime, providing that street isn't Wall Street.

36. Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money.

37. The truth is that economic competition is the very opposite of competition in the animal kingdom. It is not a competition in the grabbing off of scarce nature-given supplies, as it is in the animal kingdom. Rather, it is a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth.

38. I'm not doing my philanthropic work, out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I'm doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.

39. Money in doses disproportionate to our needs enslaves.

40. I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich.

41. Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

42. There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.

43. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

44. Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry.

45. For love is mor than gold or gret richesse; Gold faileth ofte; love wol abyde.

46. Inequalities of wealth, unjustly established, have assuredly injured the nation in which they exist during their establishment; and, unjustly directed, they injure it yet more during their existence. But inequalities of wealth justly established, benefit the nation in the course of their establishment; and, nobly used, aid it yet more by their existence.

47. And with respect to the mode in which these general principles affect the secure possession of property, so far am I from invalidating such security, that the whole gist of these papers will be found ultimately to aim at an extension in its range; and whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

48. There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest numbers of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

49. What do you suppose makes all men look back to the time of childhood with so much regret (if their childhood has been, in any moderate degree, healthy or peaceful)? That rich charm, which the least possession had for us, was in consequence of the poorness of our treasures.

50. No, let the monarch's bags and others hold The flattering, mighty, nay, al-mighty gold.

51. Success is having to worry about every damn thing in the world, except money.

52. If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.

53. Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.

54. Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

55. The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.

56. It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.

57. The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.

58. There's nothing that will change someone's moral outlook quicker than cash in large sums.

59. It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.

60. Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?

61. I don't want to make money, I just want to be wonderful.

62. To be able to give away riches is mandatory if you wish to possess them. This is the only way that you will be truly rich.

63. At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.

64. Cursed be all those on land and sea who eat their fill, cursed be all those who starve yet raise no hand in protest, cursed be all the bread, the wine, the meat which day by day descends deep in the entrails of the exploited man and turns not into freedom's cry, the murderer's ruthless knife!

65. Gold is a living god and rules in scorn, All earthly things but virtue.

66. Those who have everything but thee, my God, laugh at those who have nothing but thyself.

67. Those who own much have much to fear.

68. Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.

69. Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent.

70. Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty. As millionaires increase, pauperism grows. The more millionaires, the more paupers.

71. The unrestricted competition so commonly advocated does not leave us the survival of the fittest. The unscrupulous succeed best in accumulating wealth.

72. It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.

73. I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person.

74. He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

75. If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.

76. Money can't buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.

77. All I ask is the chance to prove that money can't make me happy.

78. If money help a man to do good to others, it is of some value; but if not, it is simply a mass of evil, and the sooner it is got rid of, the better.

79. Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.

80. George W. Bush has helped those who have most, hurt those who have least and ignored everyone in between.

81. Riches have wings, and grandeur is a dream.

82. The poor man who takes property by force is called a thief, but the creditor who can by legislation make a debtor pay a dollar twice as large as he borrowed is lauded as the friend of a sound currency. The man who wants the people to destroy the Government is an anarchist, but the man who wants the Government to destroy the people is a patriot.

83. Remember, it's as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.

84. I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich.

85. You must remember always to give, of everything you have. You must give foolishly even. You must be extravagant. You must give to all who come into your life. Then nothing and no one shall have power to cheat you of anything, for if you give to a thief, he cannot steal from you, and he himself is then no longer a thief. And the more you give, the more you will have to give.

86. I'd find the fellow who lost it, and, if he was poor, I'd return it.

87. I come without five lire. I want to leave without five lire.

88. The proprietor, producing neither by his own labor nor by his implement, and receiving products in exchange for nothing, is either a parasite or a thief.

89. How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles, in weight and sometimes in value not inferior to an ordinary Jew's-box, some of which may sometimes be of some little use, but all of which might at all times be very well spared, and of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden.

90. Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.

91. These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.

92. I sit at my table en grand seigneur, And when I have done, throw a crust to the poor; Not only the pleasure, one's self, of good living, But also the pleasure of now and then giving. So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! So pleasant it is to have money.

93. Gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal.

94. Money and goods are certainly the best of references.

95. Shaq is rich. The white man who signs his check : is wealthy. 'Ah, here you go, Shaq. Go buy yourself a bouncing car. Bling, bling!'

96. So if you're black or brown, you can make money in America, you can get rich in America : but whatever you decide to do, it better be positive, 'cause if one person is harmed, you will be destroyed. You see Oprah, she just be giving away money. She's doing that to keep the Feds off her back.

97. Wealth, howsoever got, in England makes Lords of mechanics, gentlemen of rakes; Antiquity and birth are needless here; 'Tis impudence and money makes a peer.

98. The world at large does not judge us by who we are and what we know; it judges us by what we have.

99. Those who have easy, cheerful attitudes tend to be happier than those with less pleasant temperaments, regardless of money, 'making it', or success.

100. I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice.