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Quotes of the day: The Rich
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Published Saturday, May 16, 2015 @ 9:56 PM EDT
May 16 2015


(Rich Uncle Pennybags)

A conservative is someone who demands a square deal for the rich.
-David Frost

Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
-G.K. Chesterton

Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he's always ready to escape their control.
-Nicolas Chamfort

By and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them.
-Will Durant

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
-Adam Smith

Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money.
-George Carlin

Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and powerful.
-Edward Abbey

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is poverty. What is matter with the rich is uselessness.
-George Bernard Shaw

Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labour.
-Oscar Wilde

For wealth's now given to none but to the rich.
-Martial

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich, something for nothing.
-George Bernard Shaw

He is the richest who is content with the least.
-Socrates

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
-Evelyn Waugh

History will judge societies and governments- and their institutions- not by how big they are or how well they serve the rich and the powerful, but by how effectively they respond to the needs of the poor and the helpless.
-Cesar Chavez

I believe that all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
-William Henry Harrison

I do not see in religion the mystery of the incarnation so much as the mystery of the social order. It introduces into the thought of heaven an idea of equalization, which saves the rich from being massacred by the poor.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich.
-William Saroyan

If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.
-Susan B. Anthony

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.
-Warren Buffett

In bad times, the rich usually get richer.
-Stuart Wilde

It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.
-Anton Chekhov

It is only when the rich are sick that they fully feel the impotence of wealth.
-Charles Caleb Colton

It's a crazy society now. It's the richest society ever and yet people are overworked. There's more unemployment, more crime, more confusion, more broken marriages. This is a breakdown. Every culture breaks down. Every society breaks down, whether it's Rome, Spain, the British Empire. The people in charge probably didn't get it until they had their heads chopped off.
-Jerry Brown

It's a game. We (tax lawyers) teach the rich how to play it so they can stay rich- and the IRS keeps changing the rules so we can keep getting rich teaching them.
-John Grisham

Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich.
-Samuel Johnson

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor. -Sholem Aleichem

Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.
-Thornton Wilder

Many speak the truth when they say that they despise riches, but they mean the riches possessed by others.
-Charles Caleb Colton

My visions of the future are always pretty much standard issue. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer... and there are flying cars.
-Joss Whedon

Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Of course there's a different law for the rich and poor; Otherwise who would go into business?
-E. Ralph Stewart

Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.
-Gloria Steinem

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.
-Oscar Ameringer

Poor people have more fun than rich people, they say; and I notice it's the rich people who keep saying it.
-Jack Paar

So many people spend their lives chasing money and end up as the richest men in the cemetery. I don't want to be like that.
-H. Ross Perot

Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.
-Peter Ustinov

The bonus is really one of the great give-aways in business enterprise. It is the annual salve applied to the conscience of the rich and the wounds of the poor.
-E.B. White

The difference between rich and poor is not that the rich sin is more than the poor, that the rich find it easier to call sin a virtue.
-Henri Nouwen

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
-Jawaharlal Nehru

The observances of the church concerning feasts and fasts are tolerably well-kept, since the rich keep the feasts and the poor keep the fasts.
-Sydney Smith

The petty economies of the rich are just as amazing as the silly extravagances of the poor.
-William Feather

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
-G.K. Chesterton

The poor have the same basic pleasures as the rich, and the rich will always resent it.
-Mignon McLaughlin

The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country.
-John Adams

The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.
-Andrew Carnegie

The rich are indeed rather possessed by their money than possessors.
-Robert Burton

The rich are the scum of the earth in every county.
-G.K. Chesterton

The rich man... is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.
-Henry David Thoreau

The rich really are like you and me. They just don't do as much jail time.
-John L. Smith

The rich rob the poor and the poor rob one another.
-Sojourner Truth

The rich swell up with pride, the poor from hunger.
-Sholem Aleichem

The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.
-Lewis H. Lapham

The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.
-E.F. Schumacher

The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.
-Edward Dowling

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches but the wrong comes when the riches possess men.
-Rev. Billy Graham

There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war, or famine, the rich get richer and poor get poorer. The poor even help arrange it.
-Will Rogers

There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.
-Warren Buffett

There's no reason to be the richest man in the cemetery. You can't do any business from there.
-Colonel Harlan Sanders

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...
-Walt Whitman

To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and keep absolutely sober.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

'Tough love' is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.
-Noam Chomsky

We have two American flags always; one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it, it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it, it means danger, revolution, anarchy.
-Henry Miller

Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life.
-Sean O'Casey

What we have in this country is socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.
-Gore Vidal

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.
-Andy Warhol

When people ask, 'Why should the rich pay a larger percent of their income than middle-income people?' My answer is not an answer most people get: It's because their power developed from laws that enriched them.
-Ralph Nader

When the rich make war it's the poor that die.
-Jean-Paul Sartre

Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.
-John Ruskin

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(May 17 is also the birthday of Alan Kay and Craig Ferguson)


Categories: Quotes of the day, Quotes on a topic, The Rich


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