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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:

If you are different, you had better hide it, and pretend to be solemn and wooden-headed. Until you make your fortune. For most wooden-headed people worship money; and, really, I do not see what else they can do.

Oliver Heaviside Electromagnetic Theory (1912)

Quo mihi fortunam, si non conceditur uti?
Of what use is a fortune to me, if I cannot use it?

Horace

For the folk-community does not exist on the fictitious value of money but on the results of productive labour, which is what gives money its value.

Adolf Hitler

The way to resumption is to resume.

Salmon P. Chase

Can wealth give happiness? look round and see
What gay distress! what splendid misery!
Whatever fortunes lavishly can pour,
The mind annihilates, and calls for more.

Edward Young

My father told me that when you're working, don't stop to count your money.

Pelé Pelé: A biography (1976)

When I was stamp'd, some coiner with his tools
Made me a counterfeit.

William Shakespeare Cymbeline (1611)

It is more easy to write on money than to obtain it; and those who gain it, jest much at those who only know how to write about it.

Voltaire

All the perplexities, confusions, and distresses in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from a want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.

John Adams

The brutality of a man purely motivated by monetary considerations … often does not appear to him at all as a moral delinquency, since he is aware only of a rigorously logical behavior, which draws the objective consequences of the situation.

Georg Simmel Domination (1908)

Money has been essential both for building empires and for promoting science. Neither modern armies nor university laboratories can be sustained without banks.

Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Thomas Jefferson

Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to be destroyed: when the object is to preserve them, it is no longer so.

Voltaire Questions sur l'Encyclopédie (1770)

Even the great king will appear as the poorest of men if compared with a single virtue. For his wealth is soulless, buried deep in store-houses and recesses of the earth, but the wealth of virtue lies in the sovereign part of the soul, and the purest part of existence.

Philo

The ungovernable passion for wealth.

Ovid

When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.

Alanis Obomsawin

Poor worms, they hiss at me, whilst I at home
Can be contented to applaud myself, * * * with joy
To see how plump my bags are and my barns.

Ben Jonson

Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history

Karl Marx

"Get Money, money still!
And then let virtue follow, if she will."
This, this the saving doctrine preach'd to all,
From low St. James' up to high St. Paul.

Alexander Pope

The flour merchant, the house-builder, and the postman charge us no less on account of our sex; but when we endeavour to earn money to pay all these, then, indeed, we find the interest.

Lucy Stone

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