Money and Wealth

Year after year they voted cent per cent

In epochs when cash payment has become the sole nexus of man to man.

Lenin was right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.

And honour sinks where commerce long prevails.

Get place and wealth, if possible, with grace;

The gratification of wealth is not found in mere possession or in lavish expenditure, but in its wise application.

War seldom enters but where wealth allures.

Out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. . . . The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business.

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eyes is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.

In no country in the world is the love of property more active and more anxious than in the United States; nowhere does the majority display less inclination for those principles which threaten to alter, in whatever manner, the laws of property.

It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

Rent is that portion of the earth, which is paid to the landlord for the use of the original and indestructible powers of the soil.

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. Other dangerous months are July, january, September, April, November, May, March, june, December, August and February.

I put a dollar in a change machine. Nothing changed.

Wars and revolutions and battles, you see, are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.

I’d like to live as a poor man, with lots of money.

Mankind’s greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.

Economics is the painful elaboration of the obvious.

The loss of wealth is loss of dirt, As sages in all times assert; The happy man’s without a shirt.

Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.