Wealth

"No, he was no such charlatan— Count de Hoboken Flash-in-the-Pan— Full of gasconade and bravado, But a regular, rich Don Rataplane, Santa Claus de la Muscavado, Senor Grandissimo Bastinado! His was the rental of half Havana And all Matanzas; and Santa Ana, Rich as he was, could hardly hold A candle to light the mines of gold Our Cuban owned."

"I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good."

"This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor."

""I was told", continued Egremont, "that an impassable gulf divided the Rich from the Poor; I was told that the Privileged and the People formed Two Nations, governed by different laws, influenced by different manners, with no thoughts or sympathies in common; with an innate inability of mutual comprehension"."

"Nature does not conquer the world to God. It never has. It never will. In America, with its vast abounding wealth, its grand expanse of prairie, its reach of river, and its exuberant productiveness, there is danger that our riches will draw us away from God, and fasten us to earth; that they will make us not only rich, but mean; not only wealthy, but wicked. The grand corrective is the cross of Christ, seen in the sanctuary where the life and light of God are exhibited, and where the reverberation of the echoes from the great white throne are heard."

"If you will be rich, you must be content to pay the price of falling into temptation and a snare and many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in perdition; and if that price be too high to pay, then you must be content with the quiet valleys of existence, where alone it is well with us; kept out of the inheritance, but having instead God for your portion — your all-sufficient and everlasting portion—peace and quietness and rest in Christ."

"Riches are the pettiest and least worthy gifts which God can give a man. What are they to God's word? Yea, to bodily gifts, such as beauty and health, or to the gifts of the mind, such as understanding, skill, wisdom? Yet men toil for them day and night, and take no rest. Therefore our Lord God commonly gives riches to foolish people to whom He gives nothing else."

"But Christian faith knows that wealth means responsibility, and that responsibility may come to mean only heavy arrears of sin."

"If by the consecration of my earthly possessions to some extent, I can make the Christian character practically more lovely, and illustrate, in my own case, that the highest enjoyments here are promoted by the free use of the good things intrusted to us, what so good use can I make of them?"

"Our Lord commonly giveth Riches to such gross asses, to whom he affordeth nothing else that is good."

"You often ask me, Priscus, what sort of person I should be, if I were to become suddenly rich and powerful. Who can determine what would be his future conduct? Tell me, if you were to become a lion, what sort of a lion would you be?"

"Those whom we strive to benefit Dear to our hearts soon grow to be; I love my Rich, and I admit That they are very good to me. Succor the poor, my sisters,—I While heaven shall still vouchsafe me health Will strive to share and mollify The trials of abounding wealth."

"The little sister of the Poor * * * * The Poor, and their concerns, she has Monopolized, because of which It falls to me to labor as A Little Brother of the Rich."

"Let none admire That riches grow in hell; that soil may best Deserve the precious bane."

"I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice."

"Opum furiata cupido."

"Effodiuntur opes irritamenta malorum."

"Embarras des richesse."

"Opes invisæ merito sunt forti viro, Quia dives arca veram laudem intercipit."

"Nemini credo, qui large blandus est dives pauperi."

"Get place and wealth, if possible, with grace; If not, by any means get wealth and place."

"What riches give us let us then inquire: Meat, fire, and clothes. What more? Meat, clothes, and fire. Is this too little?"

"All gold and silver rather turn to dirt! As 'tis no better reckon'd, but of those Who worship dirty gods."

"If thou art rich, thou art poor; For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows, Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey, And death unloads thee."

"O what a world of vile ill-favour'd faults Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year!"

"Jesus said that we could not serve both God and wealth, and it is obvious that Western society is organized in the service of wealth."

"I say that you ought to get rich, and it is our duty to get rich."

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

"And all you men, whom greatness does so please, Ye feast, I fear, like Damocles."

"Wealth doesn't confer automatic happiness, whereas people who are not wealthy but very much want to be, believe it will confer almost automatic and unrelieved happiness. This is not true. Part of the reason is that to get the wealth you have to behave in a way that will definitely not make you happy. It's a beautiful circularity."

"I was not, thank heaven, in a condition which compelled me to make merchandise of Science for the bettering of my fortune."

"Virtue cannot dwell with wealth either in a city or in a house."

"Conquest was how wealth was acquired. Not through entrepreneurship, invention or business. Historically, every culture has despised entrepreneurs and merchants. In India, we have the caste system. Who's at the top? The Brahmin or priest. The entrepreneur is one step from the bottom. The Islamic historian Ibn Khaldūn says that looting is morally preferable to entrepreneurship or trade. Why? Because looting is more manly. In looting, you have to beat the guy in open combat to take his stuff. America is based on a different idea. The idea of acquiring wealth not by taking it from someone else. Instead, wealth can be created through innovation, entrepreneurship and trade. Let's take a look at Manhattan. Reportedly in 1626, Native Americans sold Manhattan to the Dutch for $700 in today's money. There's land all over the world now that you can buy for $700. But when the Dutch bought Manhattan, there was no Manhattan. Prices are astronomical today because of what's been built over the past 300 years. Manhattan is the creation of the people who built it, not the original inhabitants who sold it. Manhattan represents the new American ethic of wealth creation. An alternative to conquest."

"Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source -- next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself."

"Wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. ... Everywhere the proletariat develops in step with the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the bourgeoisie grows in wealth, the proletariat grows in numbers. For, since the proletarians can be employed only by capital, and since capital extends only through employing labor, it follows that the growth of the proletariat proceeds at precisely the same pace as the growth of capital."

"Whoever prefers the material comforts of life over intellectual wealth is like the owner of a palace who moves into the servants’ quarters and leaves the sumptuous rooms empty."

"The horseman serves the horse, The neatherd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; 'T is the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind."

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me."

"In Singapore, house renovation had only one goal — to convey wealth. He had seen houses that appeared huge, with a vast amount of road frontage, only to pass by another day using another route and discover that the same house was narrower than a long boat."

"Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it."

"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

"“Harwood is the richest man in the world and ahead of the curve. He’s an agent of change, and massively invested in the status quo. He embodies paradoxical propositions. Too hip to live, too rich to die. Get it?” “No.” “We think he’s like us, basically,” Klaus says. “He’s trying to hack reality, but he’s going strictly big casino, and he’ll take the rest of the species with him.”"

"There were a few expensively bound and weirdly neutered bookazines here, but he knew from glancing through them that these were bland advertisements for being wealthy, wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative."

"French economist Thomas Piketty argued in his widely celebrated book “Capital in the 21st Century” that the rich only get richer over a long period of time, creating a permanent aristocracy of wealth. And while it’s true that the combined net worth of the “1 percent” has increased, the actual people in the 1 percent come and go. Less than 10 percent of the 400 wealthiest Americans who appeared on the Forbes list in 1982, when “Blade Runner” was released, were still there in 2012. As for the permanent aristocracy of wealth, of the 20 biggest fortunes on the 2013 Forbes list, 17 of them were self-made."

"People yelled Show me the money! and screamed it at me all the time. It was a catchphrase everybody was hungry for. It was accepted because people think that when they look at professional actors and the obscene amounts of money they get. This was making fun of that. It wasn't mean-spirited."

"There is no justification in aspiring to become rich even for a good cause. The truth is that people are frightened of being poor because they have no faith in Him who promised to provide all things needful to those who seek the kingdom of God (cf. Matt. 6:33). It is this fear that spurs them, even when they are endowed with all things, and it prevents them from ever freeing themselves from this sickly and baneful desire. They go on amassing wealth, loading themselves with a worthless burden or, rather, enclosing themselves while still living in a most absurd kind of tomb."

"Dead men are simply buried in the earth, but the intellect of a living pinchpenny is buried in the dust and earth of gold. Further, for those whose senses are in a healthy state this grave smells worse than the normal one, and the more earth one throws on it, the stronger the smell grows. For the festering wound of wretched persons buried in this way spreads, and its stench rises up to heaven, even up to the angels of God and to God Himself. They have become loathsome and repulsive, stinking on account of their folly, as David puts it (cf Ps. 38:5). Voluntary poverty - not undertaken to impress others - delivers men from this foul-smelling and deadly passion; and such poverty is precisely the 'poorness in spirit' that the Lord called blessed."

"In vain do they think themselves innocent who appropriate to their own use alone those goods which God gave in common; by not giving to others that which they themselves receive, they become homicides and murderers, inasmuch as in keeping for themselves those things which would alleviate the sufferings of the poor, we may say that every day they cause the death of as many persons as they might have fed and did not. When, therefore, we offer the means of living to the indigent, we do not give them anything of ours, but that which of right belongs to them. It is less a work of mercy which we perform than the payment of a debt."

"I am a capitalist, and after a 30-year career in capitalism... I'm not just in the top one percent, I'm in the top .01 percent of all earners. Today, I have come to share the secrets of our success, because rich capitalists like me have never been richer... How do we manage to grab an ever-increasing share of the economic pie every year? ... here's the dirty secret. There was a time in which the economics profession worked in the public interest, but in the neoliberal era, today, they work only for big corporations and billionaires... We could choose to enact economic policies that raise taxes on the rich, regulate powerful corporations or raise wages for workers... But neoliberal economists would warn that all of these policies would be a terrible mistake, because raising taxes always kills economic growth, and any form of government regulation is inefficient, and raising wages always kills jobs. Well, as a consequence of that thinking, over the last 30 years, in the USA alone, the top one percent has grown 21 trillion dollars richer while the bottom 50 percent have grown 900 billion dollars poorer, a pattern of widening inequality that has largely repeated itself across the world. And yet, as middle class families struggle to get by on wages that have not budged in about 40 years, neoliberal economists continue to warn that the only reasonable response to the painful dislocations of austerity and globalization is even more austerity and globalization."

"Greed is not good. Being rapacious doesn't make you a capitalist, it makes you a sociopath. And in an economy as dependent upon cooperation at scale as ours, sociopathy is as bad for business as it is for society.... Neoliberal economic theory has sold itself to you as unchangeable natural law, when in fact it's social norms and constructed narratives based on pseudoscience. If we truly want a more equitable, more prosperous and more sustainable economy, if we want high-functioning democracies and civil society, we must have a new economics."