Wealth

"Quo mihi fortunam, si non conceditur uti? Of what use is a fortune to me, if I cannot use it?"

"Et genus et formam regina pecunia donat."

"MAKE MONEY. MAKE MORE MONEY. MAKE OTHER PEOPLE PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE MORE MONEY."

"Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion."

"Here then we may learn the fallacy of the remark... that any particular state is weak, though fertile, populous, and well cultivated, merely because it wants money. It appears that the want of money can never injure any state within itself: For men and commodities are the real strength of any community. It is the simple manner of living which here hurts the public, by confining the gold and silver to few hands, and preventing its universal diffusion and circulation. On the contrary, industry and refinements of all kinds incorporate it with the whole state, however small its quantity may be: They digest it into every vein, so to speak; and make it enter into every transaction and contract."

""That's sixty thousand!" cried Vorobyaninov."

"Crescit amor nummi quantum ipsa pecunia crescit."

"And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

"Get money; still get money, boy; No matter by what means."

"Quantum quisque sua nummorum condit in arca, Tantum habet et fidei."

"Crescit amor nummi quantum ipsa pecunia crescit, Et minus hanc optat, qu non habet."

"Lost money is wept for with real tears."

"Increase of wealth increases our desires And hew, who least possesses, least requires."

"Alt. Translation: The love of money grows as the money itself grows."

"No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money."

"Things are simply so arranged that not all men can have money. Prometheus and Epimetheus, you say, were undeniably very wise, but all the same it is incomprehensible that when in other respects they endowed men so gloriously it did not occur to them to give them money also."

"No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction."

"Throw money at a problem and it will remain."

"Any man who spends his income, whether large or small, benefits the community by putting money in circulation."

"It would undeniably be a superb invention by laughter to imagine eternity in a financial predicament-ah, but then let us weep a little because temporality has so completely forgotten eternity and forgotten that from the eternal point of view money is less that nothing! Alas, many are of the opinion that the eternal is a delusion and that money is the reality, whereas in the understanding of eternity and of truth money is a delusion. Think of eternity in whatever way you want to; only admit that many of the temporal things you have seen in temporality you wished to find again in eternity, that you wished to see the trees and the flowers and the stars again, to hear the singing of the birds and the murmuring of the brooks again, but, could it ever occur to you that there would be money in eternity? No, then the kingdom of heaven itself would again become a land of misery, and therefore this cannot possibly occur to you, just as it cannot possibly occur to someone who believes money is reality that there is an eternity."

"Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!"

"Money in the pocket, devil in the heart."

"Your money's value is determined by a global casino of unprecedented proportions: $2 trillion are traded per day in foreign exchange markets, 100 times more than the trading volume of all the stockmarkets of the world combined. Only 2% of these foreign exchange transactions relate to the "real" economy reflecting movements of real goods and services in the world, and 98% are purely speculative. This global casino is triggering the foreign exchange crises which shook Mexico in 1994-5, Asia in 1997 and Russia in 1998. These emergencies are the dislocation symptoms of the old Industrial Age money system."

"Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves."

"Money is the devil's dung."

"Greed and competition are not a result of immutable human temperament... greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using. For example, we can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, and there is definitely enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The scarcity is in our national currencies. In fact, the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive."

"My expertise lies in international finance and money systems. This is why I have adopted here a whole systems approach to money. Whole systems take into account a broader, more comprehensive arena than economics does; it integrates not only economic interactions but also their most important side effects. This includes specifically in our case the effects of different money systems on the quality of human interactions, on society at large, and on ecological systems."

"Money is an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange."

"In essence, money is a lifeblood flowing through ourselves, our society, our global human community, and should be acknowledged and treated consciously."

"We, as lawyers, as men of business, as men of experience, know perfectly well what evils necessarily result from handing over a great family estate to a mortgagee in possession, whose only chance of getting his money is to sacrifice the interests of everybody to money-getting."

"As a rule, there is nothing that offends us more than a new kind of money."

"One cannot help regretting that where money is concerned, it is so much the rule to overlook moral obligations."

"Only think about it, it’s mysticism. You take a paper, make a special drawing on it. And suddenly the magic begins. It’s not a paper anymore. It’s any thing. Any desire. Freedom. Conquered space… But the drawing has to be very precise. If one tiny curl is missing, it seems like it makes no difference. But that’s the end. The magic is already destroyed. The paper is just a paper. But if everything is in place, look at these iridescence, the subtle magical patterns, the strict lines!"

"But for money and the need of it, there would not be half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for good if divinely used. Give it plenty of air, and it is sweet as the hawthorn; shut it up, and it cankers and breeds worms."

"It's no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want to do is make a lot of money."

"Up and down the City Road, In and out the Eagle, That's the way the money goes— Pop goes the weasel!"

"Capital is money: Capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs. Value, therefore, being the active factor in such a process, and assuming at one time the form of money, at another that of commodities, but through all these changes preserving itself and expanding, it requires some independent form, by means of which its identity may at any time be established. And this form it possesses only in the shape of money. It is under the form of money that value begins and ends, and begins again, every act of its own spontaneous generation. It began by being £100, it is now £110, and so on. But the money itself is only one of the two forms of value. Unless it takes the form of some commodity, it does not become capital. There is here no antagonism, as in the case of hoarding, between the money and commodities. The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money."

"Money, then, appears as this overturning power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc.,which claim to be essences in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence and intelligence into idiocy."

"All the perplexities, confusions, and distresses in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, as much from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation."

"And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, — what will compare with it?"

"Luat in corpore, qui non habet in ære."

"Late to bed and late to wake will keep you long on money and short on mistakes."

"Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell"

"Money couldn't buy friends, but you got a better class of enemy."

"Money brings honor, friends, conquest, and realms."

"Les beaux yeux de ma cassette! Il parle d'elle comme un amant d'une maitresse."

"Truly, it is not want, but rather abundance, that breeds avarice."

"This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

"Money is gold, and nothing else."

"I never heard of an old man forgetting where he had buried his money. Old people remember what interests them: the dates fixed for their lawsuits, and the names of their debtors and creditors."