
1940s, Third inaugural address (1941)
Stobaeus, iv. 31c. 88
Quoted by Stobaeus
1940s, Third inaugural address (1941)
Observations on the Drawing Up of Laws (1774)
Context: In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don't have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.
Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970), Chapter 1, on the oppressors
Source: Speech at the opening of Shaftesburgh Park Estate (18 July 1874), cited in Wit and Wisdom of Benjamin Disraeli, Collected from his Writings and Speeches (1881), p. 38.
“Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.”
De remediis utriusque fortunae (1354), Book II
“There is no greater wealth than Virtue,
And no greater loss than to forget it.”
Verse IV.2
Tirukkural
“I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago.”
“If either wealth or poverty are come by honesty, there is no shame.”
“Virtue with poverty didst thou prefer
To the possession of great wealth with vice.”
Canto XX, lines 26–27 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio