c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The world doesn’t need more people playing small. It’s time to stop hiding out and start stepping out. It’s time to stop needing and start leading. It’s time to start sharing your gifts instead of hoarding them or pretending they don’t exist. It’s time you started playing the game of life in a “big” way.
— T. Harv Eker
The decor was attractive and strong, but blander than she would have thought his wealth and position afforded him. Caren couldn't see the point of having that much money if all of it led to beige.
— Attica Locke, The Cutting Season
One of the advantages of real worth is that menial tasks can always be left to someone else.
— Jeffrey Archer, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less
An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in thesingle-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into thisworld, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while theenvironment in which it is placed is strictly limited.
— Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
You don't have to be like most people around you, because most people never become truly rich and wealthy.
— Manoj Arora, From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom
Statistics show that the nature of English crime is reverting to its oldest habits. In a country where so many desire status and wealth, petty annoyances can spark disproportionately violent behaviour. We become frustrated because we feel powerless, invisible, unheard. We crave celebrity, but that’s not easy to come by, so we settle for notoriety. Envy and bitterness drive a new breed of lawbreakers, replacing the old motives of poverty and the need for escape. But how do you solve crimes which no longer have traditional motives?
— Christopher Fowler, Ten Second Staircase
In the Blue Room, Cora Cash was trying to concentrate on her book. Cora found most novels hard to sympathise with -- all those plain governesses -- but this one had much to recommend it. The heroine was 'handsome, clever, and rich', rather like Cora herself. Cora knew she was handsome -- wasn't she always referred to in the papers as 'the divine Miss Cash'? She was clever -- she could speak three languages and could handle calculus. And as to rich, well, she was undoubtedly that. Emma Woodhouse was not rich in the way that she, Cora Cash, was rich. Emma Woodhouse did not lie on a lit à la polonaise once owned by Madame du Barry in a room which was, but for the lingering smell of paint, an exact replica of Marie Antoinette's bedchamber at le petit Trianon. Emma Woodhouse went to dances at the Assembly Rooms, not fancy dress spectaculars in specially built ballrooms. But Emma Woodhouse was motherless which meant, thought Cora, that she was handsome, clever, rich and free.
— Daisy Goodwin, The American Heiress
Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.
— Lawrence Durrell, Justine
The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.
— Rutherford B. Hayes, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes: Nineteenth President of the United States
wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the state
— Socrates
I remember clearly the deaths of three men. One was the richest man of the century, who, having clawed his way to wealth through the souls and bodies of men, spent many years trying to buy back the love he had forfeited and by that process performed great service to the world and, perhaps, had much more than balanced the evils of his rise. I was on a ship when he died. The news was posted on the bulletin board, and nearly everyone recieved the news with pleasure. Several said, "Thank God that son of a bitch is dead."Then there was a man, smart as Satan, who, lacking some perception of human dignity and knowing all too well every aspect of human weakness and wickedness, used his special knowledge to warp men, to buy men, to bribe and threaten and seduce until he found himself in a position of great power. He clothed his motives in the names of virtue, and I have wondered whether he ever knew that no gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man can only hate his briber. When this man died the nation rang with praise...There was a third man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, "What can we do now?" How can we go on without him?" In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, mo matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror....we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
…The more enormous our wealth, the more extensive our fears, all our possessions are paled up with new edicts every day, and hung round with gibbets to scare every invader.
— Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
You've learned the lessons well. You first learned to live on less than you earn. Next you learned to seek advice from those who are competent. Lastly, you've learned to make gold work for you.
— George S. Clason
And I advise ye to think well, he told her It's better to be a stray dog in this world than a man without money. I've tried it both ways, and I know. A poor man stinks, and God hates him.
— Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy
Miranda nods, because she knows that to be true: noble people don't do things for the money, they simply have money, and that's what allows they to be noble. They don't really have to think about it much; they sprout benevolent acts the way trees sprout leaves.
— Margaret Atwood, Hag-Seed
In Paris there are two dens, one for thieves, the other for murderers. The den of thieves is the Stock Exchange; the den of murderers is the Courthouse.
— Petrus Borel, Champavert, le lycanthrope
The reason why we have never found measure of wealth. We never sought it.
— George S. Clason, The Richest Man in Babylon
Rich and famous and doing good," mused Schlichtmann. "Rich isn't so difficult. Famous isn't so difficult. Rich and famous together aren't so difficult. Rich, famous, and doing good--now, that's very difficult.
— Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action
Great wealth, like a crowd at a concert,Gathers and melts.
— Thiruvalluvar, Kural
Oh! if the good hearts had the fat purses, how much better everything would go!
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
It is the sign of a weak mind to be unable to bear wealth.
— Seneca
Certainly, the wealth of the rich is a consequence of the poverty of the poor. (Lori Altmann, p. 85)
— Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation
Both poverty and riches are the offspring of thought.
— Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
You'll never make a fortune working for the boss man
— Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
The vast majority of Americans, at all coordinates of the economic spectrum, consider themselves middle class; this is a deeply ingrained, distinctly American cognitive dissonance.
— Ellen Cushing
The idea of luxury, even the word "luxury," was important to Arabella. Luxury meant something that was by definition overpriced, but was so nice, so lovely, in itself that you did not mind, in fact was so lovely that the expensiveness became part of the point, part of the distinction between the people who could not afford a thing and the select few who not only could, but also understood the desirability of paying so much for it. Arabella knew that there were thoughtlessly rich people who could afford everything; she didn't see herself as one of them but instead as one of an elite who both knew what money meant and could afford the things they wanted; and the knowledge of what money meant gave the drama of high prices a special piquancy. She loved expensive things because she knew what their expensiveness meant. She had a complete understanding of the signifiers.
— John Lanchester, Capital
I live in a world in which 40 men control wealth equal to that of nearly 80 countries, where to maintain their hegemony, countless acts of mayhem and massacre must occur every day. This is the reality that forms and reforms my days as it does those of all people on this hapless planet. I do not think any more that writing - mine or another's - can change the world. Perhaps in their small way, writers can answer for those who are voiceless in their extreme deprivation and suffering, but at best, in the very smallest scheme, writing can provide a moment of grace, both for her who writes and him who reads, in a very dark world.
— Cecile Pineda, Frieze
I've never understood it,' continued Wilfred Carr, yawning. 'It's not in my line at all; I never had enough money for my own wants, let alone for two. Perhaps if I were as rich as you or Croesus I might regard it differently.'There was just sufficient meaning in the latter part of the remark for his cousin to forbear to reply to it. He continued to gaze out of the window and to smoke slowly.'Not being as rich as Croesus - or you,' resumed Carr, regarding him from beneath lowered lids, 'I paddle my own canoe down the stream of Time, and, tying it to my friends' doorposts, go in to eat their dinners.' ("The Well")
— W.W. Jacobs, The Monkey's Paw and Other Tales of Mystery and Macabre
Burning fevers flee no swifter from your body if you toss under figured counterpanes and coverlets of crimson than if you must lie in rude homespun.
— Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of things
Yes, there's sense in that. But the suddenly rich are on a level with any of us nowadays. Money buys position at once. I don't say that it isn't all right. The world generally knows what it's about, and knows how to drive a bargain. I dare say that it makes the new rich pay too much. But there's no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age. It's the thing that chiefly strikes the imagination. The Englishmen who come here are more curious about the great new millionaires than about anyone else, and they respect them more. It's all very well. I don't complain of it.
— William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham
Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.
— Sylvia Townsend Warner, Kingdoms of Elfin
Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy.
— Aristophanes, Plutus
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
— Anatole France
Most of us have no sympathy with the rich idler who spends his life in pleasure without ever doing any work. But even he fulfills a function in the life of the social organism. He sets an example of luxury that awakens in the multitude a consciousness of new needs and gives industry the incentive to fulfill them.
— Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism
I do not believe that one can become rich without being a shark
—  a sensitive man will never amass wealth.
With deregulation, privatisation, free trade, what we're seeing is yet another enclosure and, if you like, private taking of the commons. One of the things I find very interesting in our current debates is this concept of who creates wealth. That wealth is only created when it's owned privately. What would you call clean water, fresh air, a safe environment? Are they not a form of wealth? And why does it only become wealth when some entity puts a fence around it and declares it private property? Well, you know, that's not wealth creation. That's wealth usurpation.
— Elaine Bernard
Wish me everything that you can wish for the woman you dearly love, and I have as good as got it, John. I have better than got it, John.
— Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
It was at this time that backgammon was invented and began to be popular. It is a kind of paradigm of how wealth is acquired, which in this world is not the reward of intelligence or ability, just as luck is not a product of skill... If luck favours the player, he gets what he wants; if it doesn't, a skilled and prudent man cannot win that which fortune only bestows on whom it likes. It is thus that the good things of this world are apportioned by chance.
— Al-Mas'udi, From the Meadows of Gold
The rich think this land is theirs though they have never earned the right to call it theirs.
— Maaza Mengiste, Beneath the Lion's Gaze
People become wealthy when they become specific... when they know what that means to them, not only in terms of the objects and amounts involved - ... but also in terms of how they want this wealth to make them feel.
— Kiki  Theo
...the oppressor is truly repressed. Their poverty is existential, often surrounded by an abundance of material goods. (Leonardo Boff, p. 179)
— Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation
One can slide between poor and rich, the difference as slight as between paper and parchment, one voice and a choir, arms hanging by sides and a hug.
— Jeannine Atkins, Borrowed Names: Poems About Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie, and Their Daughters
Wealth is the slave of a wise man
—  the master of a fool.
Where wealth is health, bankruptcy is death.
— John Maiorana (oohGiovanni)
MAMA: You must not dislike people ’cause they well off, honey.BENEATHA: Why not? It makes just as much sense as disliking people ’cause they are poor, and lots of people do that.
— Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
It took me thirty years to find myself, I had little wealth,  But I had my health
— Charmaine J Forde
The Murchisons are honest-to-God-real-foe-rich colored people, and the only people in the world who are more snobbish than rich white people are rich colored people. I though everybody knew that.
— Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
I know he's rich. He knows he's rich, too.
— Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
When you invest your life, you don’t lose it.
— Sunday Adelaja, How To Become Great Through Time Conversion: Are you wasting time, spending time or investing time?
By the aid of philosophy you will live not unpleasantly, for you will learn to extract pleasure from all places and things: wealth will make you happy, because it will enable you to benefit many; and poverty, as you will not then have many anxieties; and glory, for it will make you honoured; and obscurity, for you will then be safe from envy.
— Plutarch, Moralia
Another point of economy is to look for seed of the same kind as you sow, and not to hope to buy one kind with an other kind. Friendship buys friendship; justice, justice; military merit, military success...Yet there is commonly a confusion of expectations on these points. Hotspur lives for the moment, praises himself for it, and despises Furlong, that he does not. Hotspur of course is poor, and Furlong is a good provider. The odd circumstance is that Hotspur thinks it a superiority in himself, this improvidence, which ought to be rewarded with Furlong's lands.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
So dangerous it is for a man to come into the acquisition of great fortune before he matures in virtues and principles.
— Paul Bamikole
How do you explain a world that gifts evil men with privilege and wealth and looks the other way while they torment and abuse the weakest members of society?
— C.S. Harris, Where the Dead Lie
That law of nature whereby everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. The bread he eats is first strength and animal spirits; it becomes, in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and endurance. This is the right compound interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest power. The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation and not in augmenting animal existence.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life
Nonviolence is supremely the weapon of the dispossessed, the underprivileged, and the egalitarian, not those who are still addicted to private profit, commercial values, and great wealth.
— David T. Dellinger
The rich aren't paying for luxury - they're paying for basic humanity.
— Lindy West, Shrill
While it is easy to become paralyzed by the world's suffering and the inequalities created by corruption and greed, we actually hold immense power for change, simply by virtue of our wealth and economic independence. Because we decide where our dollars go. Never has so much wealth been so concentrated; our prosperity is unprecedented. If enough of us decided to share, we would unleash a torrent of justice to sweep away disparity, extreme poverty, and hopelessness. The world is waiting. Our kids are watching. Time is wasting. Are we willing?
— Jen Hatmaker, 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess
Carlyle! Not just another nameless entity.
— Anthony T. Hincks
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, The Hate U Give
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, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits
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, The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americas Wealthy
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, The Merchant of Venice
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, Dead Toad Scrolls
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, The Conduct of Life
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, Saurus
the fighting machines that kept the country safe, and, the coffers full.
— Julia Fierro, The Gypsy Moth Summer
There is no place more lonelyThan a rich man's home.
— Margarita Engle, The Firefly Letters
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, The Case for Reparations
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, Difficult Women
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
Dedication to God will make you like a magnet in your sphere of influence
— Sunday Adelaja
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, Emma
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, The Nicomachean Ethics
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, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
Health is wealth
— Reese Conway
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, Dubrovsky
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, Can You Forgive Her?
You have 62 people worth the amount the bottom three and a half billion people are worth. Sixty-two people! You could put them all in one bloody bus… then crash it!
— Brian Eno
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 Man in the Arena: Selected Writings
The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them inpractical fashion.
— Theodore Roosevelt, The Man in the Arena: Selected Writings
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, The Man in the Arena: Selected Writings
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, The Man in the Arena: Selected Writings
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 Man in the Arena: Selected Writings
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, 1984
Rich and wealth comes to a man only through diligence
— Sunday Adelaja
Only diligence will give you wealth
— Sunday Adelaja
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, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness
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, When She Was Good
Stupid crowds are the greatest wealth of the crook politicians!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
What I'm sure of," he began, "is that you can't be happy without money. That's all. I don't like superficiality and I don't like romanticism. I like to be conscious. And what I've noticed is that there's a kind of spiritual snobbism in certain 'superior beings' who think that money isn't necessary for happiness. Which is stupid, which is false, and to a certain degree cowardly. You see, Mersault, for a man who is well born, being happy is never complicated. It's enough to take up the general fate, only not with the will for renunciation like so many fake great men, but with the will for happiness. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time. That's the only problem that's ever interested me. Very specific. Very clear."(...)"Oh, I know perfectly well that most rich men have no sense of happiness. But that's not the question. To have money is to have time. That's my main point. Time can be bought. Everything can be bought. To be or to become rich is to have time to be happy, if you deserve it.
— Albert Camus, A Happy Death
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, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
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, The Threepenny Opera
Being rich isn't much fun when mostly everyone else is begging around you.
— Darren Paul Thorn
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, Their Lips Talk of Mischief
It is possible for you to be paid your worth and at the same time be passionate about what you do.
— Bonnie Gortler
... 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, A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings
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, Unlock the Billions in You
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, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort and pleasure
— Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
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
The greatest wealth a man can have is the richness of soul... Smile
—  It intimidates those who wish to destroy you
We hate each other by race, color, tribe, wealth, gender etc because everyone wants to feel special and different than the other. I do not however have a solution on how people can stop having an ego that makes them specially superior than the other.
— Robert Kodingo
... He was only a person on the outside and... his insides were ashes mixed with coins and a brain.
— Gail Carson Levine, Ella Enchanted
it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built “The Breakers” he damned himself.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
...Material goods have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.
— Max Weber
Wealth is to be created first, then to be shared. What to share if there is no wealth?
— Girdhar Joshi, Some Mistakes Have No Pardon
We, who were reduced to eating on the sidewalk , were suddenly elevated in status by this man's misery. We were the aristocrats and he the beggar. It flattered us. We were superbly above him and the comedy gave us a delusion of high self-respect. In a while, the magnanimity of the rich would complete the picture. We would feed our scraps to the poor.
— John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
The alienation, the downright visceral frustration, of the new American ideologues, the bone in their craw, is the unacknowledged fact that America has never been an especially capitalist country. The postal system, the land grant provision for public education, the national park system, the Homestead Act, the graduated income tax, the Social Security system, the G.I. Bill -- all of these were and are massive distributions or redistributions of wealth meant to benefit the population at large.
— Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books
Rich people don't elicit much sympathy.It is not about how to save, invest, spend, hide and give away money, but unmasking the true nature of money, how it works.Be the one to create the system that supports the kind of society we desire for ourselves and the future generation.
— Prince Akwarandu
Riches begin in the form of thought! The amount is limited only by the person in whose mind the thought is put into motion. Faith removes limitations!
— Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
How is it that when we see politics permeate every life sector we call it totalitarianism and when we see religion everywhere we call it theocracy, but when commerce dominates everything we call it liberty?
— Benjamin Barber
No paint or dye can give so splendid a colour as gilding. The merit of their beauty is greatly enhanced by their scarcity. With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves. In their eyes the merit of an object which is in any degree either useful or beautiful is greatly enhanced by its scarcity, or by the great labour which it requires to collect any considerable quantity of it, a labour which nobody can afford to pay but themselves.Book I, Chapter 11 - Rent of Land, part II
— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
You may as well know, right here, that you can never have riches in great quantities, unless you can work yourself into a white heat of desire for money, and actually believe you will possess it.
— Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
Wealth creeps under your epidermis like poison. It invades your posture, your gestures, the way you carry yourself.
— L.S. Hilton, Maestra
Unlike wealth, fame makes it easier for some men and more difficult for some to sleep around.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We have glimpsed in it the future of high society: wealth without class.
— Anna Godbersen, Splendor
When you're no one from nowhere it's best to know your limits. Rich kids can play at bohemia, but wealth has long tendrils; it twines into a safety net which can also be a trap for the unprepared. Rich kids have families and backgrounds and connections, and they ask questions, because their world functions on being able to place people. I couldn't expose myself to that.
— L.S. Hilton, Maestra
It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness
—  poverty and wealth have both failed.
Poverty, like obesity, has the tendency to add at least ten years to the appearance of its victims, especially those who are over the age of twenty.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Wealthy is not about accumulating money into banks/pockets, not about having multi-properties to count of the atmospheric knowns, "it is when you make others sorrounding you to live a mult - health, happier and balanced life converging to the wealth you have indeed reflecting your available resources that enhences their appreciative earnings". (Getting and Giving). Use your wealth to enrich others indeed.
— Wilson M. Mukama
For whom, I asked myself innocently, were the riches and dominions that the English conquered and held on to at any price in the most remote corners of the planet? The neighborhoods which succeeded one another interminably down the narrow cobbled streets were not inhabited by the beneficiaries of those enterprises.
— Sylvia Iparraguirre, Tierra del Fuego
Other than the promise of life after death, nothing consoles the poor better than the fact that rich people are also subject to death.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To be rich, focus on your wealth.
— Deyth Banger
Our lives were a series of extremes. A thanksgiving of riches was bestowed on us at birth: grace and joy and a fair share of beauty
—  privilege and power. Those blessings which luck had overlooked could be bought. We seemed to exist above the squalor of suffering as most people know it. We were envied. But there were also more expectations...
The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.
— Genghis Khan
Seven thousand of them were indicted and arraigned, and then they entered the maw of the criminal justice system—right here—through the gateway into Gibraltar, where the vans were lined up. That was about 150 new cases, 150 more pumping hearts and morose glares, every week that the courts and the Bronx County District Attorney's Office were open. And to what end? The same stupid, dismal, pathetic, horrifying crimes were committed day in and day out, all the same. What was accomplished by assistant D.A.'s, by any of them, through all this relentless stirring of the muck? The Bronx crumbled and decayed a little more, and a little more blood dried in the cracks. The Doubts! One thing was accomplished for sure. The system was fed, and those vans brought in the chow.
— Tom Wolfe
Wealth is defined in many ways, yet freedom might be its best indication.
— Todd William
The journalist Walter Lippmann identified in Henry Ford, for all his peculiarity, a common strain of "primitive Americanism." The industrialist's conviction that he could make the world conform to his will was founded on a faith that success in economic matters should, by extension, allow capitalists to try their hands "with equal success" at "every other occupation." "Mr. Ford is neither a crank nor a freak," Lippmann insisted, but "merely the logical exponent of American prejudices about wealth and success.
— Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
What's the best way to make sure that the poor have a share in a country's growing wealth: Regulation? Taxes? Philanthropy?
— Linsey McGoey, No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy
You create wealth by what you give.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Some live in poverty but with their honor; some live in wealth but with no honor! Some lives are respectable, some are disgraceful!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Capitalism brings wealth and inequality with intellectuality.
— Sandeep Sethi
It is not how much you have that matters. But how much you share that is the most important.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Our goodness is our wealth and when we close our eyes to the tragedies of the hard lives, we start losing our wealth!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
All that work: his generous patronage of the arts, the vast sums of money he had donated to worthy causes, setting up charitable organizations . . . for what? In the end, none of those good works had redeemed him in the eyes of others. People think that men like me give money away to buy forgiveness for a sin or out of vanity, when it's the winner's pathetic tribute to the loser. Look at me, we seem to be begging, I need you too. I need you to accept me, to admire me, to love me.
— Carmen Posadas, Little Indiscretions
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.
— John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren
Wealth announces itself with what's easy to break and impossible to clean. The chairs were all curvy works of art that turned sitting into yoga exercises.
— Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno
Giving is the sacred-gift that creates wealth.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Giving is the only thing that creates wealth.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Measurement aside, there are two reasons aggregate growth might matter. The first is to create jobs to assimilate the unemployed and anticipate increases in population. The second is to improve living standards. Economic logic does not require overall expansion to achieve either of these objectives. An expanding labour force can be accommodated if hours of work fall. And it's productivity growth, rather than the overall size of the economy, that drives improvements in living standards. Getting bigger doesn't necessarily yield wealth; improving productivity does.
— Juliet Schor, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth
I'm afraid that just as wealth and privilege can be a stumbling block on the path to the gospel, theological expertise and piety can also get in the way of the kingdom. Like wealth, these are not inherently bad things. However, they are easily idolized. The longer our lists of rules and regulations, the more likely it is that God himself will break one.
— Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions
Why are we occupied with material wealth than spiritual nourishment?
— Lailah Gifty Akita
In poverty a man is alone. But with prosperity, He has many friends.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
We always see other's wealth & lifestyle. But should not neglect their hard work as well...
— Gargi
It is usually imagined that a thief, a murderer, a spy, a prostitute, acknowledging his profession as evil, is ashamed of it. But the contrary is true. People whom fate and their sin-mistakes have placed in a certain position, however false that position may be, form a view of life in general which makes their position seem good and admissible. In order to keep up their view of life, these people instinctively keep to the circle of those people who share their views of life and their own place in it. This surprises us, where the persons concerned are thieves, bragging about their dexterity, prostitutes vaunting their depravity, or murderers boasting of their cruelty. This surprises us only because the circle, the atmosphere in which these people live, is limited, and we are outside it. But can we not observe the same phenomenon which the rich boast of their wealth, i.e., robbery; the commanders in the army pride themselves on their victories, i.e., murder; and those in high places vaunt their power, i.e., violence? We do not see the perversion in the views of life held by these people, only because the circle formed by them is more extensive, and we ourselves are moving inside of it.
— Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection
The best investments are in things you cannot buy.
— J.R. Rim
You do not have to be rich to live an excessively enriched life.
— Eric Zaccone
Anytime the rich and poor combine, we should listen to whoever has the least power. Rich people are conditioned to assess the world through our privileges. The powerful tend to discredit or ignore the marginalized perspective because we can. We are shielded from the effects of a lopsided equation; we reap the benefits, not the losses. We don't mean to do this (or even know we do), but we evaluate other communities through the lens of advantage assuming we know best, have the most to offer. In doing so we unintentionally elevate our perception.
— Jen Hatmaker
Poor and content is rich, and rich enough;But riches fineless is as poor as winterTo him that ever fears he shall be poor;–Good heaven, the souls of all my tribe defendFrom jealousy!
— William Shakespeare, Othello
Where wealth and status are concerned, shit isn’t supposed to be hard. Ivies are known for “grade inflation”—though there is a lot of work, the reward for a mediocre job at completing it is still usually an A. In any given corporation, the higher the role and pay, the less that person actually does. CEOs who get fired for sucking at their jobs and losing a shit-ton of money are often given multi-million dollar “golden parachutes.” It was kinda the same with this frat; we were the best, so we did the least.
— A.D. Aliwat, Alpha
She was weak and helpless, shaken in mind and nerve. It was to take her at a disadvantage to obtrude love upon her at such a time.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four
Making Money online is not the easiest, That's why my business grows daily with people who need my service. I will help you understand in a simple way how to cut out all the middle men and increase daily business in less than 1 hour per day.
— Biancco Gardner
The efficient management of organizations is key to generating wealth, for the development of a country, for the preservation of natural resources and the enhancement of the human being.
— Vinicius Montgomery
He laid there realizing how thoroughly he'd removed himself from the world or obligations, how stupidly independent he'd become: he needed no one, knew no one, was not a part of anyone's life. He'd so thoroughly removed himself from the world of dependencies and obligations, he wasn't sure he still existed.
— A.M. Homes
I think it's terrible the way people don't share things in this country. I think it's a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country, the way I was born, and let another baby be born without owning anything. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
For the case that one thinks he has plateaued in life, God has already set yet another peak for him to reach: and a much more challenging peak than his own, one that which is to serve others.
— Criss Jami, Healology