quotations about wealth
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
Jars neither of wine nor of water shall fail in the houses of the rich.
AESCHYLUS
fragment, Kabeiroi
If you do not appreciate what you now have you will never appreciate what you will have.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Wealth--the most excellent of all gods.
ARISTOPHANES
Plutus
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"
Wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
Get rich or die tryin'.
50 CENT
Get Rich or Die Tryin'
I call this inequality toxic because, over time and generations, it builds upon itself. Wealth and race map together to consolidate historic injustices, which now weave through neighborhoods and housing markets, educational institutions, and labor markets, creating an increasingly divided opportunity structure. So long as we have entrenched wealth inequality intertwined with racial inequality, we cannot even begin to bend the arc toward equity.
THOMAS M. SHAPIRO
"How Did America's Wealth Inequality Reach This Level of Toxic?", AlterNet, April 11, 2017
For having wealth and wherewithal to "do good", if you do it not, talk not of faith, for you have no faith in you.
LANCELOT ANDREWES
Ninety-six Sermons
Titles, riches, and fine houses signify no more to the making of one man better than another, than the finer saddle to the making the better horse.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
It is doubtful if even experience of riches and success is as intense among those who have experienced nothing else as among those who have also experienced poverty and failure. There is little romance in wealth to those who have been born wealthy and whose families have been wealthy for generations.
ROBERT WILSON LYND
The Little Angel: A Book of Essays
So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
HENRY GEORGE
Progress and Poverty
Great wealth may be to its owner a blessing or a curse. Alas! I fear it is too often the latter. It hardens the heart, blunts the finer susceptibilities, and transforms into a fiend what under more favourable circumstances might have been a human being.
ARNOLD BENNETT
A Question of Sex
A man is rich whose income is larger than his expenses, and he is poor if his expenses are greater than his income.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Gifts of Fortune", Les Caractères
Great wealth and great poverty will disintegrate a nation in about the same time.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
letter to Ernest Hemingway, August 1936
Wealth is an engine that can be used for power, if you are an engineer; but to be tied to the fly wheel of an engine is rather a misfortune.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
Wealth has never the value to its possessor as it is supposed to have by an avaricious admirer.
ANTHONY LISLE
The Westminster Review, January 1914
The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
Envy wealth for its power of good, not ill.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims