Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay. Princes and lords may flourish or may fade,-- A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroy'd, can never be supplied.
Great wealth, great care.
The breakdown in collective bargaining in recent years is due to the difficulty of labor and management trying to equate the relative equity of the worker and the stockholder and the consumer in advance of the facts…. If the workers get too much, then the argument is that that triggers inflationary pressures, and the counter argument is that if they don’t get their equity, then we have a recession because of inadequate purchasing power. We believe this approach (progress sharing) is a rational approach because you cooperate in creating the abundance that makes the progress possible, and then you share that progress after the fact, and not before the fact. Profit sharing would resolve the conflict between management apprehensions and worker expectations on the basis of solid economic facts as they materialize rather than on the basis of speculation as to what the future might hold…. If the workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in the profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to seek an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through augmented increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable result from the standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since their size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing as such cannot be said to have any inflationary impact upon costs and prices…. Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s vast corporate wealth. [Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, February 20, 1967.]
a mon’s real wealth isnae measured in lands, coin, or fighting men, but in the giving and receiving of a true and lasting love.
Instrumental science, that is to say, mechanics, is the most noble and most useful of sciences, inasmuch as by means of it all living bodies which have movement act; and this movement has {175} its origin in the centre of gravity which is placed in the middle, dividing unequal weights, and it has dearth and wealth of muscles and lever also and counter-lever.
Knowledge does not save from error, nor wealth from trouble.
Look at it! Think of it! A hundred and twenty men and women having no patronage, no promise of any earthly favor, no endowment, no wealth--a company of men and women having to get their living by common daily toil, and busied with all the household duties of daily life--and yet _they_ are to begin the conquests of Christianity! To them is entrusted a work which is to turn the world upside down. None so exalted but the influence of this lowly company shall reach to them, until the throne of the Cæsars is claimed for Christ. None so far off but the power of this little band gathered in an upper room shall extend to them until the whole world is knit into a brotherhood! Not a force is there on the earth, either of men or devils, but they shall overcome it, until every knee shall bow to their Master, and every tongue shall confess that He is Lord.
It ne'er was wealth, it ne'er was wealth, / That coft contentment, peace, or pleasure; / The bands and bliss o' mutual love, / O that's the chiefest warld's treasure!
The rich man's wealth is his strong city, and as an high wall in his own conceit.
If Wealth come, beware of him, the smooth, false friend! There is treachery in his proffered hand; his tongue is eloquent to tempt; lust of many harms is lurking in his eye; he hath a hollow heart; use him cautiously.--_Tupper._
Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature.
Youth, abundant wealth, high birth, and inexperience, are, each of them, the source of ruin. What then must be the fate of him in whom all four are combined?
Just as little can we afford to follow the doctrinaires of an impossible — and incidentally of a highly undesirable — social revolution which, in destroying individual rights — including property rights — and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in the advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance or the preservation of mankind is worthwhile. It is an evil and a dreadful thing to be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to our duty to do all things possible for the betterment of social conditions. But it is an unspeakably foolish thing to strive for this betterment by means so destructive that they would leave no social conditions to better. In dealing with all these social problems, with the intimate relations of the family, with wealth in private use and business use, with labor, with poverty, the one prime necessity is to remember that, though hardness of heart is a great evil, it is no greater an evil than softness of head. [“Biological Analogies in History,” History as Literature , 1913.]
Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s vast corporate wealth which is today appallingly undemocratic and unhealthy. The Federal Reserve Board recently published data from which it is possible to estimate the degree of concentration in the ownership of publicly traded stock held by individuals and families as of December 1962. Preliminary analysis of these data indicates that, despite all the talk of a “people’s capitalism” in the United States, little more than one percent of all consumer units owned approximately 70 percent of all such stock. Fewer than 8 percent of all consumer units owned approximately 97 percent—which means, conversely, that the total direct ownership interest of more than 92 percent of America’s consumer units in the corporation-operated productive wealth of this country was approximately 3 percent. Profit sharing in a form that would help to correct this shocking maldistribution would be highly desirable for that reason alone.… If workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in the profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to seek an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through augmented increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable result from the standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since their size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing as such cannot be said to have any inflationary impact upon costs and prices. [Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress on the President’s Economic Report, February 20, 1967.]
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike the inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
In marriage, as in other things, contentment excels wealth.
The world's wealth is its original men; by these and their works it is a world and not a waste; the memory and record of what Men it loves--this is the sum of its strength, its sacred "property for ever," whereby it upholds itself and steers forward, better or worse, through the yet undiscovered deep of Time.
The man who borrows in order to spend will soon be ruined, and he who lends to him will generally have occasion to repent of his folly. To borrow or to lend for such a purpose, therefore, is in all cases, where gross usury is out of the question, contrary to the interest of both parties; and though it no doubt happens sometimes that people do both the one and the other; yet, from the regard that all men have for their own interest, we may be assured that it cannot happen so very frequently as we are sometimes apt to imagine. Ask any rich man of common prudence to which of the two sorts of people he has lent the greater part of his stock, to those who, he thinks, will employ it profitably, or to those who will spend it idly, and he will laugh at you for proposing the question. [ The Wealth of Nations , Book II, Chapter 4, “Of Stock Lent at Interest.” p. 313.]
Honesta paupertas prior quam opes mal?=--Poverty with honour is better than ill-gotten wealth.
The joy of life discovered by the Greeks is not a profane type of enjoyment: it reveals the bliss of existing, of sharing \x97 even fugitively \x97 in the spontaneity of life and the majesty of the world. Like so many others before and after them, the Greeks learned that the surest way to escape from time is to exploit the wealth, at first sight impossible to suspect, of the lived instant.
Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die, But leave us still our old nobility.
For the rich men without scruple drew the estate into their own hands, excluding the rightful heirs from their succession; and all the wealth being centred upon the few, the generality were poor and miserable. Honourable pursuits, for which there was no longer leisure, were neglected; the state was filled with sordid business, and with hatred and envy of the rich. There did not remain above seven hundred of the old Spartan families, of which, perhaps, one hundred might have estate in land, the rest were destitute alike of wealth and of honour, were tardy and unperforming in the defense of their country against its enemies abroad, and eagerly watched the opportunity for change and revolution at home. [“Agis,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans , Translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. (New York: Random House, Modern Library edition, p. 962).
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it, than to consume wealth without producing it.
We believe that “Kelsonian economics”… constitutes a revolution in economic thinking, and a possible channel for the real American revolution that needs to be undertaken.… The economic emancipation of the vast majority of citizens not through redistributing other people’s wealth…but through the creation of new wealth and new ownership…. The real revolution in the United States economically is to make operative the promise of capitalism for the masses instead of building the wealth of a few at the expense of the many. [Editorial, “For A REAL Berkeley Revolution — Individual Ownership for All,” November 23, 1970.]
Our educational institutions do not teach the value and importance of the individual’s right to own private property, the necessity of exercising that right for his economic security, the necessity of the wide distribution of wealth for the proper functioning of democracy, the difficulties of acquiring and retaining proprietorship, its desirability, and the responsibilities accompanying it. In our classrooms no attempt is made to inculcate in the minds of students the determination to improve their status in life by becoming proprietors of some kind of productive wealth. Social studies texts assign full chapters to labor, but only a few references to ownership. Neither of the terms “ownership” or “proprietorship” is to be found in some encyclopedias. The omission of a correct and systematized treatment of the subject of ownership in our education institutions is tantamount to a taboo and contributes immensely to keeping our youth in ignorance of it. [“Our Double Standard of Prosperity, ” quoted in The Wanderer , August 20, 1992.]
Learning maketh young men temperate, is the comfort of old age, standing for wealth with poverty, and serving as an ornament to riches.--_Cicero._
Base wealth preferring to eternal praise.
Much learning shows how little mortals know; much wealth, how little worldlings can enjoy.
Those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman, who has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll, creating a happy soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own love.--_George Eliot._
Money is the root of all wealth.
The libertarian good society lies…in the maximum dispersion of property compatible with effective production or, as process, in progressive reconciliation of conflicts between equality and efficiency. Such process involves increasing dispersion both of wealth among persons and families and of proximate productional control among enterprises or firms.… [ Economic Policy for a Free Society . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948, p. 27.]
_Proof of Jesus Christ._--The supposition that the apostles were deceivers is thoroughly absurd. Suppose we follow it out, and imagine these twelve men assembled after the death of Jesus Christ, making a plot to say that he was risen again. By this they attack all earthly powers. The heart of man is strangely inclined to fickleness and change, swayed by promises and by wealth. Had one of these men contradicted themselves under these temptations, nay more, had they done so in prison, in torture and in death, they were lost. Let that be followed out.
And what is friendship but a name, A charm that lulls to sleep, A shade that follows wealth or fame, And leaves the wretch to weep?
It is better to live in a haunted forest ... than to live amongst relations after the loss of wealth.
Work is a means; it is not an end. And for any tasks that can be performed or eliminated by a capital instrument, human labor is not the best means…. Furthermore, we have science, engineering and management — the three disciplines — that really plan and control the production of goods and services, trying to eliminate labor. Who the hell is government to come along and try to create labor? The people who are producing wealth are trying to eliminate toil, while the politicians are trying to create it. This to me is absence of logic, absence of plan, absence of system, absence of thought.
Where wealth and freedom reign, contentment fails, / And honour sinks where commerce long prevails.
We must, if we would husband life and not waste it, bravely resolve to dispense with the dispensable, to content ourselves with the minimum of want, to stake our reputation, if such be dear to us, upon intrinsic worth, and show once again, if we can, by our mere life and labour, what are the "roots of honour" and the "veins of wealth."
The great and rich depend on those whom their power or their wealth attaches to them.
Can wealth give happiness? look around and see, / What gay distress! what splendid misery! / Whatever fortunes lavishly can pour, / The mind annihilates and calls for more.
But Justice shines in smoky cottages, and honors the pious. Leaving with averted eyes the gorgeous glare obtained by polluted hands, she is wont to draw nigh to holiness, not reverencing wealth when falsely stamped with praise, and assigning each deed its righteous doom.--_Æschylus._
Shame of poverty is almost as bad as pride of wealth. Pr.
The widespread distribution of private property ownership is the cornerstone of American liberty. Without it neither our free enterprise system nor our republican form of government could long endure.… The next Republican Administration will…not only protect the cherished human right of property ownership, but will also work to help millions of Americans — particularly those from disadvantaged groups — to share in the ownership of the wealth of their nation.
Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children. [ Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Road to Socialism by Maurice Isserman in Civil Rights to Human Rights; Martin Luther King, Jr. , and The Struggle for Economic Justice by Thomas F. Jackson, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006; In King’s Own Words , from a 1965 speech to the Negro American Labor Council quoted in Jackson’s book.]
Let us look at home. For seventy years peace and industry have had their way among us with less interruption and under more favourable conditions than in any other country on the face of the earth. The wealth of Croesus was nothing to that which we have accumulated, and our prosperity has filled the world with envy. But Nemesis did not forget Croesus: has she forgotten us?
Central bank functions and operations are widely misunderstood, not only by the public in general but also by many financial and economic professionals. The Federal Reserve system operates in such a way that it makes no contribution whatever to the spread of ownership of productive assets among the population. Indeed, its policies have tended to concentrate economic power by restricting credit to those with an existing asset base and by maintaining an interest rate structure designed to reward speculation and discourage productive entrepreneurship. [“Fed Should Share the Wealth,” The Journal of Commerce , May 15, 1989.] Bailey, Dr. Norman A. The problem with monetary economists is that they don’t understand money. [1988.]
Ne'er let your gear owergang ye=, _i.e._, never let your wealth get the better of you.
Licet superbus ambules pecunia, / Fortuna non mutat genus=--Although you strut insolent in your wealth, your fortune does not change your low birth.
A commune is where people join together to share their lack of wealth.
The discovery of the soul, the first attempts at naming the soul, started everywhere from the simplest observations of material facts. The lesson cannot be inculcated too often that the whole wealth of our most abstract and spiritual words comes from a small number of material or concrete terms.
The wealth-making techniques of credit leverage are one of the most efficient and direct methods of producing affluence in a poor society. The program is brilliantly creative and specific. [ Black Capitalism: Strategy for Business in the Ghetto .]
He [Tiberias Gracchus] told them that the commanders were guilty of a ridiculous error, when, at the head of their armies, they exhorted the common soldiers to fight for their sepulchres and altars; when not any amongst so many Romans is possessed of either altar or monument, neither have they any houses of their own, or hearths of their ancestors to defend. They fought indeed and were slain, but it was to maintain the luxury and the wealth of other men. They were styled the masters of the world, but in the meantime had not one foot of ground which they could call their own. “Tiberius Gracchus,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans , Translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. (New York: Random House, Modern Library edition, p. 999).
Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves only in the legal sense. Technology was the slave’s real emancipator. Technology freed the slave by transferring his toil onto the tireless backs of non-human slaves driven by water, steam, petroleum and electricity. But the Black man…has never owned, and never had a chance to own, the machine that replaced and indeed, surpassed his power to toil a thousandfold. When he lost his servitude he lost his livelihood. As Frederick Douglas said, “Emancipation made the slaves free to hunger; free to the winter and rains of heaven…free without roofs to cover them or bread to eat or land to cultivate.” For all his good intentions, Lincoln didn’t free the slaves. He fired them.… People who teach economics are mostly white, but the people who understand economics are mostly Black.… Slavery taught us WHO had the leisure, WHO had freedom, WHO had wealth. Not the slave, but the slave owner. Not the sharecropper, but the land-owner. Not the employee, but the capital owner. [Statement on 1969 founding of Soul City, North Carolina on the 160th Anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth; former President of the Congress or Racial Equality (CORE).]
Rome was in the most dangerous inclination to change on account of the unequal distribution of wealth and property, those of highest rank and greatest spirit having impoverished themselves by shows, entertainments, ambition of offices, and sumptuous buildings, and the riches of the city having thus fallen into the hands of mean and low-born persons. So that there wanted but a slight impetus to set all in motion, it being in the power of every daring man to overturn a sickly commonwealth. [“Cicero,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans , translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. (New York: Random House, Modern Library edition, p. 1046).]
The unrestricted competition so commonly advocated does not leave us the survival of the fittest. The unscrupulous succeed best in accumulating wealth..
If capital produces most of the economy’s wealth and income is distributed on the basis of productive input, the individual can hardly reach his goal — an affluent level of income — solely by means of his labor.
Said Scopas of Thessaly, "We rich men count our felicity and happiness to lie in these superfluities, and not in those necessary things."
Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of Nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep.--_Emerson._
Learn to be pleased with everything; with wealth so far as it makes us of benefit to others; with poverty, for not having much to care for; and with obscurity, for being unenvied.
Magn? fortun? comes adest adulatio=--Adulation is ever the attendant on great wealth.
O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.
The rich man does not feel his wealth with any vividness.
Union and co-operation in war obviously increase the power of the individual a thousand fold. Is there the shadow of a reason why they should not produce equal effects in peace; why the principle of co-operation should not give to men the same superior powers, and advantages, (and much greater) in the creation, preservation, distribution and enjoyment of wealth?
The way to wealth is as plain as the way to market; it depends chiefly on two words--industry and frugality.
Take heed to this. What is it to be superintendent, chancellor, first president, but to be in a condition wherein from early morning a vast number of persons flock in from every side, so as not to leave them an hour in the day in which they can think of themselves? And if they are in disgrace and dismissed to their country houses, though they want neither wealth nor retinue at need, they yet are miserable and desolate because no one hinders them from thinking of themselves.
Embarras de richesses=--An encumbrance of wealth.
In 1910, capital inequality there was very high, though still markedly lower than in Europe: the top decile owned about 80 percent of total wealth and the top centile around 45 percent (see Figure 10.5). Interestingly, the fact that inequality in the New World seemed to be catching up with inequality in old Europe greatly worried US economists at the time. Willford King’s book on the distribution of wealth in the United States in 1915—the first broad study of the question—is particularly illuminating in this regard.13 From today’s perspective, this may seem surprising: we have been accustomed for several decades now to the fact that the United States is more inegalitarian than Europe and even that many Americans are proud of the fact (often arguing that inequality is a prerequisite of entrepreneurial dynamism and decrying Europe as a sanctuary of Soviet-style egalitarianism). A century ago, however, both the perception and the reality were strictly the opposite: it was obvious to everyone that the New World was by nature less inegalitarian than old Europe, and this difference was also a subject of pride.
Poesy is love's chosen apostle, and the very almoner of God. She is the home of the outcast, and the wealth of the needy.