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Money Quotes

Karl Marx and Robert Kiyosaki are tied for the most entries here, which is about as wide a spread of opinion as one page can hold. The sourced quotes lean towards the sceptics. Thoreau’s journal for 1838 says the richest man is the one whose pleasures are the cheapest. Chesterton, in his novel The Flying Inn (1914), is less polite about the rich.

“The lack of money is the root of all evil” is credited to Mark Twain, and it does appear in a posthumous piece of his from 1905. It had already been in print, though. Wikiquote finds it in 1872, set in quotation marks as if readers would know it, and a similar remark about gold in a magazine from 1859.

Random quote on Money

Most quoted on money:

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.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

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)

A country’s wealth comes not from taxes but from production.

Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)

In truth, poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

Walter Bagehot Walter Scott : The Critical Heritage (1970)

Inflation is an increase in the quantity of money without a corresponding increase in the demand for money, i.e., for cash holdings.

Ludwig von Mises

Virtue cannot dwell with wealth either in a city or in a house.

Diogenes of Sinope

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

George Bernard Shaw

The sweet simplicity of the three per cents.

Benjamin Disraeli Endymion (1880)

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

Henry David Thoreau Journals (1838)

If the love of money is the root of all evil, the need of money is most certainly the root of all despair.

Isaac Asimov The Early Asimov Book One (1972)

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

G. K. Chesterton The Flying Inn (1914)

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

John Updike Couples (1968)

The desire for wealth is nearly universal, and none can say it is not laudable, provided the possessor of it accepts its responsibilities, and uses it as a friend to humanity.

P. T. Barnum Art of Money Getting (1880)

I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money's sake.

John D. Rockefeller Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (1906)

I knew once a very covetous, sordid fellow, who used to say, "Take care of the pence, for the pounds will take care of themselves."

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

Ploutos, no wonder mortals worship you:
You are so tolerant of their sins!

Theognis of Megara

The purified righteous man has become a coin of the Lord, and has the impress of his King stamped upon him.

Clement of Alexandria

If money is all that a man makes, then he will be poor — poor in happiness, poor in all that makes life worth living.

Herbert N. Casson Herbert N. Casson cited in: Forbes magazine (1950)

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