quotations about wealth
While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.
HOWARD ZINN
A People's History of the United States
Nought is there in wealth
That serves as bulwark 'gainst the subtle stealth
Of Destiny and Doom.
AESCHYLUS
Agamemnon
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
Get rich or die tryin'.
50 CENT
Get Rich or Die Tryin'
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
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"
The rich man's happiness is but from the teeth outwards, a counterfeit satisfaction, with a worm in his heart.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
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
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
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
Wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
If you do not appreciate what you now have you will never appreciate what you will have.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
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
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
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
Great wealth and great poverty will disintegrate a nation in about the same time.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Our wealth is often a snare to ourselves, and always a temptation to others.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
letter to Ernest Hemingway, August 1936
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