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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:

A dollar is something that you multiply — something that causes an expansion of your house and your mechanical equipment, something that accelerates like speed; and that may be also slowed up or deflated. It is a value that may be totally imaginary, yet can for a time provide half-realized dreams.

Edmund Wilson Europe without Baedeker (1947)

Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source -- next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.

Friedrich Engels The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876)

"That's Mao."
"Do people still respect him?"
"The government pays lip service to his memory, but the hero worship of past eras is over."
"And what about the ordinary people?"
"The so-called proletariat?"
"Yup."
"They've found another god to follow."
"Xi Jinping?"
"Money."

Shamini Flint

Let us not envy a certain class of men for their enormous riches; they have paid such an equivalent for them that it would not suit us; they have given for them their peace of mind, their health, their honour, and their conscience; this is rather too dear, and there is nothing to be made out of such a bargain.

Jean de La Bruyère Les Caractères (1688)

And to hie him home, at evening's close,
To sweet repast, and calm repose.
* * *
From toil he wins his spirits light,
From busy day the peaceful night;
Rich, from the very want of wealth,
In heaven's best treasures, peace and health.

Thomas Gray

The lands and houses, the goods and merchandise and the money of the world are owned by a very few. All the rest in some way serve that few for so much as the law of life and trade permit them to exact.

Clarence Darrow

Simple rules for saving money.
To save half: When you are fired by an eager impulse to contribute to a charity, wait, and count to forty.
To save three-quarters, count sixty.
To save it all, count sixty-five.

Mark Twain More Tramps Abroad (1897)

Riches are the pettiest and least worthy gifts which God can give a man. What are they to God's word? Yea, to bodily gifts, such as beauty and health, or to the gifts of the mind, such as understanding, skill, wisdom? Yet men toil for them day and night, and take no rest. Therefore our Lord God commonly gives riches to foolish people to whom He gives nothing else.

Martin Luther

Money is more open-minded than language, state law, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money... can bridge almost any cultural gap, and does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation.

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

We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world — no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.

Woodrow Wilson

I worship freedom; I abhor restraint, trouble, dependence. As long as the money in my purse lasts, it assures my independence; it relieves me of the trouble of finding expedients to replenish it, a necessity which has always inspired me with dread; but the fear of seeing it exhausted makes me hoard it carefully. The money which a man possesses is the instrument of freedom; that which we eagerly pursue is the instrument of slavery. Therefore I hold fast to that which I have, and desire nothing.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Most Americans have no real understanding of the operations of the international moneylenders... the accounts of the Federal Reserve have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and... manipulates the credit of the United States

Barry Goldwater With No Apologies (1979)

Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil.

Ayn Rand

Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.

Winston Churchill The Second World War (book series) (1948)

Money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.

Aristotle

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

There should, I feel, be one branch [of the Black Panther Party] that is purely political, operating the rent strikes, the breakfast programs, the People's Bazaar's where all sorts of food are sold, hospitals or clinics (free, of course), and what I will term cottage shops to employ those who will work for the new medium of exchange—love and loyalty.

Jonathan P. Jackson Blood in My Eye (1971)

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

W. Somerset Maugham

Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?

Robert G. Ingersoll Some Mistakes of Moses (1879)

There will always be the poor as long as there are the rich.

Manu Joseph

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