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- Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
- Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH, "The Deserted Village"
Wealth makes an ugly person beautiful to look on and an incoherent speech eloquent; and wealth alone can enjoy pleasure even in sickness and can conceal its miseries.
SOPHOCLES, The Sons of Aleus [fragment]
There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavour of life until he has known poverty, love and war. The justness of this reflection commends it to the lover of condensed philosophy. The three conditions embrace about all there is in life worth knowing. A surface thinker might deem that wealth should be added to the list. Not so. When a poor man finds a long-hidden quarter-dollar that has slipped through a rip into his vest lining, he sounds the pleasure of life with a deeper plummet than any millionaire can hope to cast.
O. HENRY, "The Complete Life of John Hopkins"
Wealth is nothing more or less than a tool to do things with. It is like the fuel that runs the furnace or the belt that runs the wheel -- only a means to an end.
HENRY FORD, Theosophist Magazine, Feb. 1930
The first wealth is health.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Power," The Conduct of Life
In every well-governed state, wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.
ANATOLE FRANCE, Penguin Island
Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth -- the soil and the labourer.
Wealth which breeds idleness ... is only a sort of human oyster-bed, where heirs and heiresses are planted, to spend a contemptible life of slothfulness in growing plump and succulent for the grave-worm's banquet.
HORACE MANN, A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
Behind the deceptive words designed to entice people into supporting violence -- words like democracy, freedom, self-defense, national security -- there is the reality of enormous wealth in the hands of a few, while billions of people in the world are hungry, sick, homeless.
HOWARD ZINN, preface, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
Competition, founded upon the conflicting interests of individuals, is in reality far less productive of wealth and enterprise than co-operation, involving though it does the constant apparent sacrifice of the individual to the common interests.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON, A City Set on a Hill
There is no road to wealth so easy and respectable as that of matrimony.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE, Doctor Thorne
Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. And it will leave you unfulfilled.
BARACK OBAMA, speech, Jul. 12, 2006
Real estate is at the core of almost every business, and it's certainly at the core of most people's wealth. In order to build your wealth and improve your business smarts, you need to know about real estate.
DONALD TRUMP, Think Like a Billionaire
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
My conception of America is a land where men and women may walk in ordered freedom in the independent conduct of their occupations; where they may enjoy the advantages of wealth, not concentrated in the hands of the few but spread through the lives of all; where they build and safeguard their homes, and give to their children the fullest advantages and opportunities of American life; where every man shall be respected in the faith that his conscience and his heart direct him to follow; where a contented and happy people, secure in their liberties, free from poverty and fear, shall have the leisure and impulse to seek a fuller life.
HERBERT HOOVER, speech, Oct. 22, 1928
We may lack riches, but the greatest fortune is what lies in our hearts.
Wealth is power, and power is the only thing about which contemporary culture cares.
- Three courses open lie to wealth, to give, enjoy, or lose,
- Who shrinketh from the former two, perforce the third doth choose.
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
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