Wealth Quotes

Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.

~ Ivan Illich

I suddenly remember how different I am from most of the kids here. Nobody would have to drag me or my brothers to the Bahamas; we'd swim there if we could. For us, a family vacation is staying at a local hotel with a swimming pool for a weekend.

~ Angie Thomas

So why do we call her crazy for piling her trailer full of more cats than she could take care of but applaud when somebody accumulates more money than they can spend? They're both hoarders.

~ David Wong

How do you judge the professionals you patronize? Too many people judge them by display factors. Extra points are given to those who wear expensive clothes, drive luxury automobiles, and live in exclusive neighborhoods. They assume a professional is likely to be mediocre, even incompetent, if he lives in a modest home and drives a three-year-old Ford Crown Victoria. Very, very few people judge the quality of the professionals they use by net worth criteria. Many professionals have told us they must look successful to convince their customers/clients that they are.

~ Thomas J. Stanley

And yet for aught I see, they are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing. It is no mean happiness, therefore, to be seated in the mean. Superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer.

~ William Shakespeare

We cannot measure a person’s value to the human race by tabulating the size of his estate. We must judge each person by his or her final contribution to humanity and nature.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

They should own who can administer, not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and nature is the problem of civilization.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why are you all wasting human labour and the world’s wealth in building machinery to commit mass murder – creatures that for half a million years and more have been endowed with reason – conscious beings who discovered a better way long centuries ago?

~ Eden Phillpotts

the fighting machines that kept the country safe, and, the coffers full.

~ Julia Fierro

There is no place more lonelyThan a rich man's home.

~ Margarita Engle

Habits are the determinant of who will be rich or be poor.

~ Bamigboye Olurotimi

Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say - that American propserity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

On Money - There are many ways to get rich quickly. All of them are risky. Some of them are dangerous. A few of them are downright fatal.

~ Marsha Hinds

The ladies in her classes loved to speak to Caridad in broken Spanish, to show her they were comfortable with her ethnicity despite the paleness of their skin and the wealth of their husbands.

~ Roxane Gay

No one should ever be allowed to make you feel unworthy of becoming wealthy. Your wealth lies mainly upon your understanding of your worth.

~ Gift Gugu Mona

The rich are all alike, to revise Tolstoy’s famous words, but the poor are poor in their own particular ways. Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it takes to write it. But as with most generalizations, a truth lies behind it. Ultimately, what binds the rich together is that they have more money, lots more. For one reason or another, the poor don’t have enough of it. But poverty doesn’t bind the poor together as much as wealth and the need to protect it bind the rich. If it did, we would hear the rattle of tumbrels in the streets. One hears mutterings, but the chains have not yet been shed.

~ William Mcpherson

You are very fond of bending little minds; but where little minds belong to rich people in authority, I think they have a knack of swelling out, till they are quite as unmanageable as great ones.

~ Jane Austen

Nor is he liberal who gives with pain; for he would prefer the wealth to the noble act, and this is not characteristic of a liberal man. But no more will the liberal man take from wrong sources; for such taking is not characteristic of the man who sets no store by wealth.

~ Aristotle

But one thing was quite clear…” he wrote. “[B]eing broke didn’t disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time.” Bloom went on to become a congressman and one of the crafters of the charter that founded the United Nations.

~ Erik Larson

Tell him that riches will not procure for you a single moment of happiness. Luxury consoles poverty alone, and at that only for a short time, until one becomes accustomed to it.

~ Alexander Pushkin

Idle Jeffrey, when asking his cousin for money: I fear I have not a mercenary tendency. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and his cousin, Plantagenet Palliser: Men must have mercenary tendencies or they would not have bred. The man who plows, so he may live, does so because, luckily, he has mercenary tendencies.Jeffrey: Just so, but you see I am less lucky than the plowman.Palliser: There is no vulgar error so vulgar, that is to say common or erroneous, as that by which men have been taught to say that mercenary tendencies are bad. The desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Civilization comes from what men call greed. Let your mercenary tendencies be combines with honesty, and they cannot take you astray.

~ Anthony Trollope

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

We should not take part in acting a lie any more than in telling a lie. Weshould not say that men are equal where they are not equal, nor proceed uponthe assumption that there is an equality where it does not exist; but we shouldstrive to bring about a measurable equality, at least to the extent of preventingthe inequality which is due to force or fraud.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them inpractical fashion.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in anycommonwealth if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if theytend to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for whichthey are supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the readytalker, however great his power, whose speech does not make for courage,sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the bodypolitic, and it speaks ill for the public if he has influence over them. To admirethe gift of oratory without regard to the moral quality behind the gift is to dowrong to the republic.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

That is why I decline to recognize the meremultimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country;and especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses hiswealth in a way that makes him a real benefit, of real use- and such is often thecase- why, then he does become an asset of real worth.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

Character must show itself in the man'sperformance both of the duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state.The man's foremast duty is owed to himself and his family; and he can do thisduty only by earning money, by providing what is essential to material wellbeing;it is only after this has been done that he can hope to build a highersuperstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after this has beendone that he can help in his movements for the general well-being. He must pullhis own weight first, and only after this can his surplus strength be of use to thegeneral public. It is not good to excite that bitter laughter which expressescontempt; and contempt is what we feel for the being whose enthusiasm tobenefit mankind is such that he is a burden to those nearest him; who wishes todo great things for humanity in the abstract, but who cannot keep his wife incomfort or educate his children.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed.

~ George Orwell

Wealth and riches are not evil, it is having love for wealth and riches that is evil

~ Sunday Adelaja

The three wealthiest people in the world own more than the GDP of forty-eight countries!

~ Alice Walker

Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized--that was the dream of his life.

~ Philip Roth

More than anything, it is that sense - that despite great differences in wealth, we rise and fall together - that we can't afford to lose.

~ Barack Obama

And I did work out something: that the rich of the earth indeed create misery, but they cannot bear to see it. They are weaklings and fools just like you. As long as they have enough to eat and can grease their floors with butter so that even the crumbs that fall from your table grow fat, they can't look with indifference on a man collapsing from hunger - although, of course, it must be in front of their house that he collapses.

~ Bertolt Brecht

That's the problem getting rich. You use up your whole life doing it. Just to sit up the front of the aeroplane.

~ Alan Warner

... I have always thought of Christmas-time... as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

~ Charles Dickens

No one is born poor. People choose to become and remain poor. No one became wealthy from begging. Only people who have set limits on themselves do that. No one became wealthy from living off handouts. This is not the will of God for anyone. No one became wealthy from foraging in people’s bins. Only rats do that. You can excel and make money where you are without running helter skelter in search of green pastures.

~ Uyoyou C. Charles-Iyoha

More than anyone else in the society, these men had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. And what they did then was to build a place which seems to illustrate, as in a child’s primer, that the production ethic led step by step to unhappiness, to restrictiveness, to entrapment in the mechanics of living.

~ Joan Didion

From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort and pleasure

~ Michel Foucault

The key to understanding if something is truly precious is to ask if we can hold it, for things truly precious cannot be held.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If a politician obtained a great wealth after he has been elected, his being an immoral corrupt man is not a possibility but it is a self-evident reality!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan