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Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don't have to do it by the yard. By the inch it's a cinch. And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.

— Nelson Algren A Walk on the Wild Side (1956)

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More quotes by Nelson Algren

A man who won't demean himself for a dollar is a phoney to my way of thinking.

What country is there for a white man who isn't white?

The clock in the room above the Safari told only Junkie Time.

The Man with the Golden Arm (1949)

A writer who knows what he is doing isn't doing very much.

I am the penny whistle of American literature.

All Nelson Algren quotes →

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Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

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Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Nelson Algren (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.