Quotes about money
page 34

“If I have to hire a labourer for a week, and instead of ten shillings I pay him eight, no variation having taken place in the value of money, the labourer can probably obtain more food and necessaries with his eight shillings than he before obtained for ten: but this is owing, not to a rise in the real value of his wages, as stated by Adam Smith, and more recently by Mr. Malthus, but to a fall in the value of the things on which his wages are expended, things perfectly distinct; and yet for calling this a fall in the real value of wages, I am told that I adopt new and unusual language, not reconcilable with the true principals of the science. To me it appears that the unusual and, indeed, inconsistent language is that used by my opponents.”

David Ricardo (1772–1823) British political economist, broker and politician

Source: The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) (Third Edition), Chapter I, Section I, On Value, p. 11

Food, Appearance, Science

“It is really to be lamented that after a public servant has passed a life in important and faithful services, after having given the most plenary satisfaction in every station, it should yet be in the power of every individual to disturb his quiet, by arraigning him in a gazette and by obliging him to act as if he needed a defence, an obligation imposed on him by unthinking minds which never give themselves the trouble of seeking a reflection unless it be presented to them. However it is a part of the price we pay for our liberty, which cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it. To the loss of time, of labour, of money, then, must be added that of quiet, to which those must offer themselves who are capable of serving the public, and all this is better than European bondage. Your quiet may have suffered for a moment on this occasion, but you have the strongest of all supports that of the public esteem.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to John Jay from Paris, France (January 25, 1786). Source: “ From Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 25 January 1786 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-09-02-0190,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 9, 1 November 1785 – 22 June 1786, ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954, p. 215.] 1780s

Life, Faith, Support, Freedom

“Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet choose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to exalt it by its influence on reason alone; that the impious presumption of legislature and ruler, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time: That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; … that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; and therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust or emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religions opinion, is depriving him injudiciously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow-citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emolumerits, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, … and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, Chapter 82 (1779). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 1 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-01_Bk.pdf, pp. 438–441. Comparison of Jefferson's proposed draft and the bill enacted http://web.archive.org/web/19990128135214/http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7842/bill-act.htm 1770s

Men, God, Truth, World

“Almost everything in the pop culture lexicon of vampirism is basically fiction—and fiction is the art of telling entertaining lies for money.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 9, “Committee Processes” (p. 159)

Art

“Time is the one thing money can’t buy.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 3, “Big Tent” (p. 44)

Time

“Imagine a world where speaking or writing words can literally and directly make things happen, where getting one of those words wrong can wreak unbelievable havoc, but where with the right spell you can summon immensely powerful agencies to work your will. Imagine further that this world is administered: there is an extensive division of labour, among the magicians themselves and between the magicians and those who coordinate their activity. It’s bureaucratic, and also (therefore) chaotic, and it’s full of people at desks muttering curses and writing invocations, all beavering away at a small part of the big picture. The coordinators, because they don’t understand what’s going on, are easy prey for smooth-talking preachers of bizarre cults that demand arbitrary sacrifices and vanish with large amounts of money. Welcome to the IT department.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Ken MacLeod in Introduction: Charlie’s Demons (p. xvi)
The Laundry Files, The Atrocity Archives (2004)

People, World, Making love, Imagination

“Quote, the viability of a postsingularity economy of scarcity is indicated by the transition from an indirection-layer-based economy using markers of exchange of goods and services to a tree-structured economy characterized by optimal allocation of productivity systems in accordance with iterated tit-for-tat prisoner’s dilemma. Money is a symptom of poverty and inefficiency. Unquote.”

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 6, “Telegram from the Dead” (p. 143)

Quotes, Optimism, Tree

“In the short-run, the market is a voting machine - reflecting a voter-registration test that requires only money, not intelligence or emotional stability - but in the long-run, the market is a weighing machine.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Disputed

Intelligence

“Generally speaking, under capitalism, the ownership of capital is separate from the application of capital to production; money capital is separate from industrial or productive capital; the rentier, living entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all those directly concerned in the management of capital.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Three

“Right now, the average worker in America is making, in inflation-accounted-for dollars, and despite a huge increase in technology and worker productivity, exactly the same amount of money that he or she made 43 years ago. That’s incomprehensible.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

2010s, 2019, June 2019

Making love

“We have accepted a warped sense of priorities which says America can always find enough money for war, but that there is never enough for infrastructure or education or nutrition programs. We are going to reject that idea and invest in our people.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Twitter, https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/ (3 July 2019) 2010s, 2019, July 2019

War, People, Education, Idea

“Every group was broke cause the liberal bulge that used to support most radical causes was off on some other trip, playing around with anti-ABM campaigns and sending food to Biafra. Even though they wept and shed some blood in the streets of Chicago, they were gone for good - gone with their money. Our revolution was becoming too radical or crazy or violent or young. We were fuckin up their cocktail parties and it mattered not the blood we were shedding or the growing fascism in the country. New ways had to be found to get bread cause the days of the mailings and benefits were over. In fact, for the Yippies, they had never even begun.”

Abbie Hoffman book Woodstock Nation

The Great Rip Off
Woodstock Nation (1969)

Food, Way, Support, Country

“The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.”

Henry David Thoreau book Life Without Principle

Life Without Principle (1863)

Way, Cheating

“The people are on the side of sound money. They are so unalterably on the side of sound money that it is a serious question how they would regard the system under which they live, if they once knew what the initiated can do with it.”

Henry Ford book My Life and Work

Source: My Life and Work (1922), p. 110. Chapter XII.

People, Question

“Both Barnum and H. L. Mencken are said to have made the depressing observation that no one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public. The remark has worldwide application. But the lack is not in intelligence, which is in plentiful supply; rather, the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking.”

Carl Sagan book Broca's Brain

Source: Broca's Brain (1979), Chapter 5, “Night Walkers and Mystery Mongers: Sense and Nonsense at the End of Science” (pp. 58-59)

Intelligence, Thinking, Training

“Mr. Madison wished to relieve the sufferers, but was afraid of establishing a dangerous precedent, which might hereafter be perverted to the countenance of purposes very different from those of charity. He acknowledged, for his own part, that he could not undertake to lay his finger on that article in the Federal Constitution which granted a right of Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Summation of Madison's remarks (10 January 1794) Annals of Congress, House of Representatives, 3rd Congress, 1st Session, p. 170 http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llac&fileName=004/llac004.db&recNum=82; the expense in question was for French refugees from the Haitian Revolution; this summation has been paraphrased as if a direct quote: "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." 1790s

Suffering, Parting

“In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good deal of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living. Our proclivity to details cannot quite degrade our life, and divest it of poetry. The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy, and all the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind. Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses. Property keeps the accounts of the world, and is always moral. The property will be found where the labor, the wisdom, and the virtue have been in nations, in classes, and (the whole life-time considered, with the compensations) in the individual also. How wise the world appears, when the laws and usages of nations are largely detailed, and the completeness of the municipal system is considered! Nothing is left out.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

Love, Life, Wisdom, God

“Conditions have greatly changed in Great Britain since the end of the war owing to the existence of full employment. Negotiations about wages between the two sides of industry now take place in entirely different circumstances. There is no reserve of labour to compete for jobs. … If wages rise faster than productivity the increases in cost can usually be passed on in increased selling prices. There is thus in the economic system very much less check on the upward movement of money wages. …if wages at home rise unchecked, it is more likely in general that exports will gradually cease to be competitive and there will be balance of payments difficulties. These can be met, in the end, by devaluation. A succession of devaluations completely undermines confidence in any currency. … It is clear that a very difficult problem faces a country such as ours, which wishes to maintain full employment and yet to avoid the undoubted evils of rising prices and balance of payments difficulties abroad.”

Hugh Gaitskell (1906–1963) British politician

Memorandum, 'Wages and Prices and Full Employment' (1 December 1950), quoted in Correlli Barnett, The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities: 1945–1950 (London: Pan, 1996), pp. 350–352
Chancellor of the Exchequer

War, Home, Confidence, Problem

“It’s a combination of things that are happening now, Amy, that make it clear to more and more members of Congress that you can’t keep a straight face on all of this incredible indebtedness, talk about all the money that we’ve shoveled out to Wall Street, and credit isn’t loosening up, unemployment is still at all-time highs. We’re projected in Detroit to have more foreclosures on homes than last year. And so, we’ve got to turn with — especially with all the shouts about being fiscally conservative, the way to climb out of this is to reduce the obligations of our government. Here we are in hundreds of billions of dollars of war debt, and our president is saying we now have to have an emergency funding, which is merely another way of saying we’re going to specially fund the Afghanistan surge. It makes no sense. And I think militarily, it is not logical. And, of course, morally, I can’t remember anything like this since Korea and Vietnam…”

John Conyers (1929–2019) American politician from Michigan

Rep. John Conyers and Out of Afghanistan Caucus Oppose Obama Admin’s $33B Escalation of Afghan War, DemocracyNow! https://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/1/conyers (1 July 2010)

War, Making love, Way, Home

“The trouble about Europe is what I call the Olive Line, the line below which people grow olives. North of the Olive Line people pay their taxes and spend public money very cautiously. South of it they fail to pay their taxes at all, but spend a lot of public money.”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

Interview https://www.channel4.com/news/by/michael-crick/blogs/healey-case-for-leaving-europe-stronger-than-staying with Michael Crick (9 May 2013) 2010s

People

“If I had power and could legislate, I should certainly stop all proselytising. It is the cause of much avoidable conflict between classes and unnecessary heart-burning among the missionaries… In Hindu households the advent of a missionary has meant the disruption of the family coming in the wake of change of dress, manners, language, food and drink. … The other day a missionary descended on a famine area with money in his pocket, distributed it among the famine-stricken, converted them to his fold, took charge of their temple and demolished it. This is outrageous. The temple could not belong to the converted, and it could not belong to the Christian missionary. But this friend goes and gets it demolished at the hands of the very men who only a little while ago believed that God was there.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Mahatma Gandhi The Collected Works Volume 61, Ahmedabad, 1975, p, 46-57. As quoted in Goel, S.R. History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)
Posthumous publications (1950s and later)

Men, God, Family, Food

“Four have pleaded not guilty while four are being tried in absentia. The Chief accused, Saeed Ramadan, is among those not in court and he is now living outside Egypt. Khattab said it was Ramadan who contacted him through agents to draw up the plans to assassinate President Nassor and carry out the acts of sabotage. He said he had pretended to agree in order to obtain as much money from Ramadan as he could. The prosecution has alleged Ramadan received money from the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and sent it to Khattab in Alexandria.”

Said Ramadan (1926–1995) Egyptian political activist

1966, page 33 of Mideast Mirror, Volume 18 https://books.google.ca/books?id=7q8MAQAAMAAJ, from Arab News Agency About

Drawing

“America needs a #PeaceDividend from ending regime change wars / new cold war / arms race. Invest that money in healthcare, education, infrastructure, clean air, food, water for all.”

Tulsi Gabbard (1981) U.S. Representative from Hawaii's 2nd congressional district

Twitter account, February 2019

War, Education, Food, Water

“For too long, perhaps ever since the war, we postponed facing up to fundamental choices and fundamental changes in our society and in our economy. This is what I mean when I say we have been living on borrowed time. For too long this country – all of us, yes this Conference too – has been ready to settle for borrowing money abroad to maintain our standards of life, instead of grappling with the fundamental problems of British industry. Governments of both parties have failed to ignite the fires of industrial growth in the ways that countries with very different political and economic philosophies have done.”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool (28 September 1976), quoted in James Callaghan, Time and Chance (Collins, 1987), p. 425
Prime Minister

Life, War, Way, Problem

“We are living although the majority of the people do not realize it, in the midst of an immense revolution. What is radically wrong with our condition lies in the harsh contrast between rich and poor. This cannot go on forever, as we are human beings with human differences. No use is being made of religion, the only way towards alleviation and compensation; on the contrary, attempts are being deliberately made to excite the masses into asserting their equality with the middle and upper classes. The State contents itself with attempts to improve the material circumstances of the workers, with the only result that their covetousness has been intensified. The possibility of acquiring great sums of money by speculation has developed a fondness for luxury and enjoyment which has taken hold of wide circles. German family life is going to the dogs. Unfortunate marriages, divorces, youthful corruption, pleasure-seeking, the anxiety to seem richer than one is–all this is increasing terribly. In the lower classes of the great cities the demoralization has already reached a high degree … The unequal distribution of wealth with all its consequences must lead in the end to a catastrophe.”

Alfred von Waldersee (1832–1904) Prussian Field Marshal

Waldersee in his diary, 9 November 1890

Life, Marriage, People, Pleasure

“Tikka Khan was a soldier doing a soldier’s job. He went to East Pakistan with precise orders and came back by precise orders. He did what he was ordered to do, though he wasn’t always in agree ment, and I picked him because I know he’ll follow my orders with the same discipline. And he won’t try to stick his nose in politics. I can’t destroy the whole army, and anyway his bad reputation for the events in Dacca is exaggerated. There’s only one man really responsible for those events—Yahya Khan. Both he and his advisers were so drunk with power and corruption they’d even forgotten the honor of the army. They thought of nothing but acquiring beautiful cars, building beautiful homes, making friends with bankers, and sending money abroad. Yahya Khan wasn’t interested in the government of the country, he was interested in power for its own sake and nothing else. What can you say of a leader who starts drinking as soon as he wakes up and doesn’t stop until he goes to bed? You’ve no idea how painful it was to deal with him. He was really Jack the Ripper.”

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979) Fourth President and ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan

Oriana Fallaci. Interview with Ali Bhutto in Karachi, April 1972

Pain, Bad luck, Making love, Beauty

“Now, you have to tighten your belts, because we, your leaders, mis-spent your hard-earned money.”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

Know what would make tightening my belt a little easier? If I could tighten it around Jesse Helms' scrawny little chicken-neck.
Rant in E-Minor (1997)

“It’s pretty sad that people think low Congressional staff pay is a good thing. Low pay a big reason why money in politics is a problem - you can make a lot more money becoming a lobbyist & setting up a relationship w/ one, since the actual job doesn’t pay enough.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989) American politician

Twitter Quotes (2019), February 2019

People, Sadness, Making love, Problem

“Man…. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

Misattributed, "What surprises you most about humanity?"

Health, Making love, Future

“To-day the most comprehensive system of social security ever introduced into any country would start in Britain. The four Acts—National Insurance, Industrial Injuries, National Assistance, and National Health Service—represented the main body of the army of social security. … We cannot create a scheme which gives the nation a whole more than they put into it, and it is always the general level of production that settles our standard of material well-being. Only higher output can give us more of the things we all need. This will decide the real value of the money payments.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast (4 July 1948), quoted in The Times (5 July 1948), p. 6
Prime Minister

Health, Country

“As a nation we have two tasks; the one is to provide goods and services for our home needs, the other is to pay for the food and raw materials which we must get from abroad. Before the war we were rich; we owned money and railways and so forth abroad. The income from these helped to pay for our imports; but we sold these in order to help to win the war. We have therefore borrowed large sums from Canada and the United States to tide us over while we build up again, but when this money runs out we must pay for what we want from our own resources. To do this we must devote a far larger part than ever before of the wealth we produce to pay for imports.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast (18 March 1947), quoted in The Times (19 March 1947), p. 4
Prime Minister

War, Food, Home, Help

“It was not the fashion for politicians who aspired to elective office to live ostentatiously, no matter how much money they had. If they loved luxury—and most of them did—they indulged that love in ways less publicly obvious than by living in mansions. The public believes what it thinks it sees.”

Fredric Brown book Rogue in Space

Source: Rogue in Space (1957), Chapter 3 (p. 364)

Love, Making love, Way, Fashion

“The loss of many traditional jobs in everything from art to healthcare will partly be offset by the creation of new human jobs. GPs who focus on diagnosing known diseases and administering familiar treatments will probably be replaced by AI doctors. But precisely because of that, there will be much more money to pay human doctors and lab assistants to do groundbreaking research and develop new medicines or surgical procedures.”

Yuval Noah Harari book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Disease, Art, Loss

“No amount of money would stave off a nuclear warhead.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 3 (p. 328)

“Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1880s, Plea for Free Speech in Boston (1880)

“We want two things. We want relief from the pressure of excessive taxation, and at the same time we want money to meet our own domestic needs at home, which have been too long starved and neglected owing to the demands on the taxpayer for military purposes abroad.”

Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the Albert Hall, London (21 December 1905), quoted in The Times (22 December 1905), p. 7
Prime Minister

Home, Time

“I have grown into a Bestsellasaurus Rex — a big, stumbling book-beast that is loved when it shits money and hated when it tramples houses… I started out as a storyteller; along the way I became an economic force.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

The Politics of Limited Editions essay in Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 6 (June 1985), republished in various real world publications, including The Stephen King Story (1992) by George W. Beahm, p. 112

Love, Hate, Books, Making love

“You know, in his last six months Vasyl had changed a lot. Many tried to talk him out of going to the war, but he was adamant. All his money and all his energy he gave to the cause of the new Ukraine. It was his motivation in life. What a shame that a sharpshooter’s bullet took the life of terrific vocalist and patriot. Our duty is to remember Vasyl Slipak. I want to join my Ukrainian colleagues to discuss some future art projects. We already had a meeting with Volodymyr Syvokhip, director of the Lviv Philharmonic Society, and we plan to hold a Vasyl Slipak Open International Memorial Music Marathon in Lviv from June 29 till July 1.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

2017 Nicolas Krauze, conductor, the Orchestre de Chambre Nouvelle Europe (France). “He loved Ukraine above all”. The Day. Кyiv.ua. - 2017. - 7 March. https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/culture/he-loved-ukraine-above-all

Life, War, Art, Music

“He was really successful, he had very many concerts in Paris. In music circles everyone knew him. I believe that in about five years he would have become a hugely famous singer, because he was getting more and more invitations as an artist. I never saw him in a bad mood, he radiated positive emotions even if things were not going best. Meanwhile, it was not always easy for him, there were various situations concerning his career or money. When we were working on concert programs, he acted very professionally. We had a great relationship as colleagues. We knew and sensed each other well. Also, sometimes we had very personal conversations.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

Bad luck, Music, Mood, Sense

“On the eve of the Republic, opponents are now demanding that we, the government, change its colour policy so that they can make more money. … Some people think we need them and keep a pistol to our head and ask for the forfeiting of certain aspects of our colour policy. We are not for sale. Our colour policy is not for sale.”

Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966

People, Making love, Thinking, Change

“I think the testimony was that one should not receive payment that would properly be due to the enslaved. But this country is, to this very day, receiving payment that was due to its enslavers. That’s the way inheritance works in this country, however one might feel about that. If I assemble a mass of money, I have the right to pass that on to my kid. My kid has the right to do whatever and then pass it on to their kid. And so, there’s something fundamentally injust if I have secured that money by taking it from one group, and then I pass that money on to my kid.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Reparations Are Not Just About Slavery But Also Centuries of Theft & Racial Terror, Democracy Now (20 June 2019)

Way, Feeling, Thinking, Country

“Jim Crow was theft. First and foremost, it was theft. If I tax you or if tell you you have to be loyal to this country and pledge fealty to its laws, but then I don’t give you the same degree of protection, I don’t give you the same access to resources that I give to another group of people, I have effectively stolen something from you. I have stolen your tax money. I have stolen your fealty.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Reparations Are Not Just About Slavery But Also Centuries of Theft & Racial Terror, Democracy Now (20 June 2019)

People, Law, Country

“The average African-American family in this country making $100,000, which is, you know, decent money, actually lives in the same kind of neighborhood that the average white family making $35,000 a year lives in. That is totally tied to the legacy of enslavement and Jim Crow and the input and the idea in the mind that white people and black people are somehow deserving of different things.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Reparations Are Not Just About Slavery But Also Centuries of Theft & Racial Terror, Democracy Now (20 June 2019)

People, Making love, Family, Idea

“Prior to World War II, most socialists and socialist parties of Europe held strong anti-Semitic opinions and railed against the capitalistic middle class and wealthy, especially money-lending Jews who engaged in usury. Their schemes called for wealth-confiscation and redistribution to create a truly equal society.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the ‘Free Left’ and the ‘Statist Left', (2019), p. 369

War, World, Strong, Wealth

“When increase of production is accompanied by an augmented pauperization of the masses, consumption must simultaneously decrease, stagnation and crises must ensue. A superabundance of actual wealth in the hands of the few must create hunger, typhus, and other epidemics among the many. The injustice - yea the idiocy - of this state of affairs is evident. The money-bags of course merely shrug their shoulders. This they will continue to do until a rope well tied over their shoulders will end all further shrugging.”

Johann Most (1846–1906) German-American anarchist politician, newspaper editor, and orator

The Beast of Property (1884)

Hunger, Wealth

“There can be no such thing in the long run as the prosperity of an isolated nation…until the trade of the world once more begins to move from one country to another and goods can be exchanged and paid for—until that happens there is no permanency to the security we have gained. Does not that bring us back to this, that while we all know that we have got to go on, and go on quickly, with this matter of armaments, there is driven into us once more the mad folly of Europe to-day in the expenditure she is making on armaments at the sacrifice of her international trade? We have to do what we can in our conversations with foreign countries to show the folly of this, which, if protracted too long, may bring ruin to us all. Therefore we have still to hold on to the faith that sooner or later it may be possible once again to discuss the reduction of armaments. If and when that time comes we must all of us throw our weight into the effort. This massing of huge armaments on the Continent, even the work that we are doing—the money would be far better used for the progress of the world.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the centenary dinner of the City of London Conservative and Unionist Association (2 July 1936), quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), pp. 44-45.
1936

World, Making love, Faith, Effort

“When the paintings suddenly started going for, like, really big money it definitely weirded me out, and I kind of went away to the middle of nowhere and I stopped making any more paintings. But the whole time the auction houses were just selling paintings that I’d done years before and sold for not much money. Or paintings that I traded for a haircut or, you know, an ounce of weed and they were going for like 50 grand.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

lightly edited
Other sources

Making love, Time, Painting, Housing

“What’s wrong with empowering government? When you give government new powers and responsibilities, you are also increasing its police power. If we put government in charge of a thing — say, ensuring income equality — we are also handing it the power to police that thing nationwide, to impose penalties for breaches of its new regulations, and ultimately to coerce citizens into compliance. At the limit, we grant the state the power to take our money, imprison us, and even execute us if we violate its laws.”

Paul D. Miller (academic) American academic

Why Socialism Is Bad (2018)

Law, Penalty

“Foolish, ignorant and vicious persons go to books for their thoughts and judgments, and for all their elevated and noble sentiments, just as a rich woman goes with her money to a draper.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Les sots, les ignorans, les gens malhonnêtes, vont prendre dans les livres des idées, de la raison, des sentimens nobles et élevés, comme une femme riche va chez un marchand d'étoffes s'assortir pour son argent.
Maximes et Pensées, #572
Maxims and Considerations

Books, Personality

“Despising money is like toppling a king off his throne.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Il y a une sorte de plaisir attaché au courage qui se met au-dessus de la fortune. Mépriser l'argent, c'est détrôner un Roi. Il y a du ragoût.
Maximes et Pensées, #142
Reflections

“Even the ministers of religion were not exempt from this cruel necessity. While they warned their flocks against the love of money, regard for their families compelled them to keep an outlook for the pecuniary prizes of their calling. Poor fellows, theirs was indeed a trying business, preaching to men a generosity and unselfishness which they and everybody knew would, in the existing state of the world, reduce to poverty those who should practice them, laying down laws of conduct which the law of self-preservation compelled men to break.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 26.

Love, Men, World, Making love

“In your day fully nineteen twentieths of the crime, using the word broadly to include all sorts of misdemeanors, resulted from the inequality in the possessions of individuals; want tempted the poor, lust of greater gains, or the desire to preserve former gains, tempted the well-to-do. Directly or indirectly, the desire for money, which then meant every good thing, was the motive of all this crime, the taproot of a vast poison growth, which the machinery of law, courts, and police could barely prevent from choking your civilization outright.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 19

Law, Motivation

“Unlawful revenue which, after being conveniently cleaned, is then reinvested within the legal economy: polluting it, corrupting it, forging it, killing it. Whether it’s reinvested in the London property market, in Parisian restaurants, or in hostels on the French Riviera. Drug trafficking money will buy homes that honest folk can no longer afford; it will open shops that will sell at more competitive prices than legitimate shops; it will start businesses that can afford to be more competitive than clean businesses. But one thing must be clear: these businesses are not interested in being successful; the main purpose for which they were created was to launder money, turning money that shouldn’t even exist into clean and usable money. In silence, illegal assets are moving around and undermining our economy and our democracies. In silence. But it doesn’t stop here; organised crime is providing us with a winning economic model. Organised crime is the only segment of global economy to have not been affected by the financial crisis; to have profited from the crisis, to have fed on the crisis, to have contributed to the crisis. And it’s in the crisis that it finds its satellite activities, such as usury, gambling, counterfeiting. But the most important – and most alarming – aspect of this issue is that it’s exactly in times of crisis that criminal organisations find their safe haven in banks.”

Roberto Saviano (1979) Italian journalist, writer and essayist

Dirty Money in London event (2016)

Democracy, Home, Business, Silence

“Sher Shah gave to many of his kindred who came from Roh money and property far exceeding their expectations.”

Sher Shah Suri (1486–1545) founder of Sur Empire in Northern India

... "To every pious Afghan who came into his presence from Afghanistan, Sher Shah used to give money to an amount exceeding his expectations, and he would say, 'This is your share of the kingdom of Hind, which has fallen into my hands, this is assigned to you, come every year to receive it.'" And to his own tribe and family of Sur, who dwelt in the land of Roh, he sent an annual stipend of money, in proportion to the members of his family and retainers; and during the period of his dominion no Afghan, whether in Hind or Roh was in want, but all became men of substance. It was the custom of the Afghans during the time of sultans Bahlul and Sikandar, and as long as the dominions of the Afghans lasted, that if any Afghan received a sum of money or a dress of honour, "that sum of money or dress of honour was regularly apportioned to him, and he received it every year". Sher Shah Suri too said, "It is incumbent upon kings to give grants to imams; for the prosperity and populousment of the cities of Hind are dependent on the imams and holy men... whoever wishes that God Almighty should make him great, should cherish Ulama and pious persons, that he may obtain honour in this world and felicity in the next."
Abbas Sarwani, Tarikh-i-Sher Shahi, trs. E.D. vol. IV, pp. 390, 424. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 5

“Part of it, which perhaps you and most other observers are not aware, is that I have enough passive income, and enough dispassion for conventional status signaling, that my marginal utility of money is pretty low compared to my disutility for doing busywork.”

Wei Dai Cryptocurrency pioneer and computer scientist

To put it in perspective, I quit my last regular job in 2002, and stopped doing consulting for that company as well (at $100/hour) a year later when they merged with Microsoft and told me I had to do a bunch of paperwork and be hired by Microsoft's "independent consulting company" in order to continue. In a discussion thread https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jter3YhFBZFYo8vtq/look-for-the-next-tech-gold-rush#ikKBYevf2aL2pBwsS on LessWrong, July 2014

Parting

“We cannot fuck our way to freedom. Sexuality alone, and heterosexuality in particular, is never enough to destabilise complex architectures of money and power. Without political agitation, sex can always be co-opted, calcifying gender revolution into another weary parade of saleable binary stereotypes.”

Laurie Penny book Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

Conclusion
Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2010)

Sex, Way, Freedom

“It is a bourgeois feeling to overvalue the possession of representatives. In representation as in money there is power – power over others. Whoever places the purity and the greatness of our party above all else, for him representatives have value only in so far as they serve to give expression to the power and extent of Social Democracy. What do ten, what do a hundred representatives signify, when our escutcheon has lost its gloss through their acquisition? The value of a representative is small. But the value of the integrity of our party is immeasurable. In it rests our strength.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

As with the shorn hair, that signified his manhood’s honor, the strength of Samson disappeared, so the strength of our party would cease if we allowed the bourgeois Delilahs to flatter away our most precious jewel and the roots of our triumphal strength – the party purity, the party honor.
No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Feeling, Democracy

“I did a lot of preaching this week. I had my sermons ready. The good part is the congregation was listening. I wish I had passed the collection plate. I would’ve made a lot of money. But I did it for free.”

Herm Edwards (1954) American football player, coach and analyst

Edwards, following a win against the Chargers in 2006. With Kansas City Source: Schraeger, Peter. Get ready to meet Herm http://web.archive.org/web/20070930032843/http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/6915026 FOXSports.com, 13 June 2007.

Parting

“The young people nowadays – men and women, amateurs and pros – generally fall into one of two categories: either they don’t know what it is that’s most important to them, or they know but don’t have the power to go after it. But this girl’s different. She knows what’s most important to her and she knows how to get it, but she doesn’t let on what it is. I’m pretty sure it’s not money, or success, or a normal happy life, or a strong man, or some weird religion, but that’s about all I can tell you. She’s like smoke:you think you’re seeing her clearly enough, but when you reach for her there’s nothing there. That’s a sort of strength, I suppose. But it makes her hard to figure out.”

Ryū Murakami book Audition

Source: Audition (1997), Chapter Eight, Kai

Life, Women, Men, Happiness

“Mr Raghuram Rajan is an outstanding man who understands central banking. He is probably only one in the world among the crowds of professors at central banks that actually has a good grip on monetary policies and what you can or cannot achieve with them. He should get the Noble Prize in economics but the others are all money printers at heart, all of them.”

Raghuram G. Rajan (1963) Indian economist

Marc Faber, economist, as quoted in " Raghuram Rajan only central banker I trust, he should get Nobel in Economics: Marc Faber http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-08-12/news/65490521_1_marc-faber-rbi-governor-boom-doom-report", The Economic Times (12 August 2015)

World, Understanding, Heart

“There’s about 30 full time volunteers here who are really fighting to try to raise the level of true independent art and make a point that this festival has become dominated by real elitist force because they have a top-heavy bureaucrat, just like the American government, just like the major media conglomerates. The guys at the top who are all making a shit load of money and they’re driving the people below them into oblivion, into poverty.”

Lloyd Kaufman (1945) American film director

CraveOnline http://www.craveonline.com/film/articles/507781-exclusive-cannes-interview-lloyd-kaufman-on-nuke-em-high May 28, 2013 2013

People, Making love, Art, Guy

“What set him apart from almost all the freedom fighters who held high offices in independent India was his complete freedom from material desire. He had no source of income and would not accept money from his children or from well-wishers. He had to be forced to sign an application for the freedom fighters pension of Rs 500 per month.”

Gulzarilal Nanda (1898–1998) Prime Minister of India

Rediff.com, in "Former PM Gulzarilal Nanda dead".

Children, Freedom

“Money was nice but it was not everything to the actor whose greatest joys were words, words, and words.”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

Biography, in "Life: Richard Burton"

Joy

“As Rajiv Gandhi was going past me, I got a thought in my head. I thought of how India was helping the terrorists with money, arms and military training. As these thoughts came into my head, when Gandhi was about two or three feet away from me. Yes, I felt an emotion. I despised the Indian Prime Minister. I aimed a blow with my rifle at Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi�s back, below the shoulder.”

Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) sixth Prime Minister of India

Wijemuni Vijitha Rohana, the person who attacked Rajiv Gandhi Colombo, in Rohana: Courage of his convictions (29 July 2007) http://www.nation.lk/2007/07/29/special5.htmVijitha In Rohana: Courage of his convictions http://www.nation.lk/2007/07/29/special5.htmVijitha

Past, Help, Training

“Then afterwards, when victory is yours, we too-all of us Bengalis-will share in the honour and the glory. We do not need to understand what is it that you have done. Or to have given you any thought, time or money, but the moment we hear the chorus or praises in The Times from the lips of the Englishmen we shall lap it up. Some important news papers in our country will observe we are not inferior men; and another paper will observe we are making discovery after discovery in science. Earlier we shall not have felt an iota of responsibility towards you, but when victory has been won and you return home bearing a crop of records, then you will be one of us. Soughing and ploughing you will do alone; reaping we shall do together. The victory you will find will be more ours than yours.”

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) Bengali polymath, physicist, biologist, botanist and archaeologist

After his recognition by the west Rabindranath Tagore wrote to Bose. Quoted in "Science and National Consciousness in Bengal: 1870-1930", pages=107-08

Men, Making love, Home, Understanding

“The Tick comes to mind. … that was just my favorite thing ever, and it was so smart and clever, and I loved it. I felt honored to get to step into the shoes of the Tick, and it just didn’t get love…not from the network, you know. The network killed it. It’s had a pretty fantastic after life on DVD, but it could have been a great series if they decided they wanted to spend any money at all back at the time. It became all about reality TV for them. They discovered they could spend very little money and get huge numbers.”

Patrick Warburton (1964) American actor

"A chat with Patrick Warburton" at Bullz-Eye.com (23 Februarty 2009) http://www.bullz-eye.com/television/interviews/2009/patrick_warburton.htm

Love, Life, Making love, Shoe

“When you introduce markets in food, then you introduce two very simple rules. The first rule is this: if you have money you can get the food from wherever around the world. The other rule markets impose is this: if you do not have money, you will starve. This is an important point … The reason why people starve is because of poverty … not because of a shortage of food … but because the only way to access the food is through the market.”

Raj Patel (1972) British academic

About global food economy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU5zT1r5Fk8 Marquette University (Retrieved on February 11, 2010.)

People, World, Food, Way

“Dzagoev plays football not for fame and money, but because, football is his life. It is rare today that a victory is more important for a player, then the prize-money for it. But Alan - is exactly that case.”

Alan Dzagoev (1990) Russian association football player

Igor Rodkin, 2008. http://www.sports.ru/football/5862197.html

Life, Victory, Football

“Harry Dresden: But there were some things I believed in. Some things I had faith in. And faith isn’t about perfect attendance to services, or how much money you put on the little plate. It isn’t about going skyclad to the Holy Rites, or meditating each day upon the divine. Faith is about what you do. It’s about aspiring to be better and nobler and kinder than you are. It’s about making sacrifices for the good of others—even when there’s not going to be anyone telling you what a hero you are.”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

Source: The Dresden Files, Changes (2010), Chapter 26

Making love, Faith, Perfection

“Rickey had all the money and all the players and never let the two get together.”

Branch Rickey (1881–1965) American baseball player and coach

Ralph Kiner, speaking on April 15, 2004, Jackie Robinson Day, in the FSNY broadcast booth; as quoted in "Dog Gone? No Way; Russo Listens to Heart, Stays with FAN" by Bob Raissman, in New York Daily News (April 18, 2004), p. 85

“When I realized I was going to have to be a whore, to put my face on the label, I decided that the only way I could do it was to give away all the money we make. Over the years, that ethical stance has given us a 30 per cent boost. One in three customers buys my products because all the profits go to good causes and the rest buy the stuff because it is good.”

Paul Newman (1925–2008) American actor and film director

Quoted in "Saint Paul," http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,1453395,00.html interview with John Aldridge, The Guardian (2005-04-10)

Making love, Way, Whore

“If you ask anyone why they are driven, it’s not just money, it’s not just a need to prove themselves, it’s a combination of things, and for us if we can get women to look at themselves in terms of shape, not size, if Suze and I achieve that as our little gravestone thing, then that would be a fucking big achievement.”

Trinny Woodall (1964) English fashion advisor and designer, television presenter and author

Retail therapists (2007)

Women

“Yet we are obliged, to regard a man with so little about him that is ornamental or entertaining, or attractive, as a very considerable personage in the history of his country. Belonging to an age of gigantic intellect and gigantic attainments, he was admired by his contemporaries, and time has in no degree impaired his fame. He is most familiar to us as an author. Smart legal practitioners, who are only desirous of making money by their profession, neglect his works, and sneer at them as pedantic and antiquated; but they continue to be studied by all who wish to know the history and to acquire a scientific and liberal knowledge of our judicial and political institutions. His Opus Magnum is this Commentary upon Littleton, which in itself may be said to contain the whole common law of England as it then existed. Notwithstanding its want of method and its quaintness, the author writes from such a full mind, with such mastery over his subject, and with such unbroken spirit, that every law student who has made, or is ever likely to make, any proficiency, must peruse him with delight.”

Edward Coke (1552–1634) English lawyer and judge

Lord Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices, Vol. 1, 338.
About, The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904)

Age, Making love, Law, History

“Most Americans, in their sweet innocence, think that class has to do with money. But a glance at Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley will indicate that it has very little to do with money. It has to do with taste and style, and it has to do with the development of those features by acts of character. That was one of my points: to try to separate class from mercantilism or commercialism.”

Leona Helmsley (1920–2007) American hotel owner

Paul Fussell, Humanities Interview, 1996

Thinking

“Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, observed that elites in a society typically maintain their power not simply by controlling the means of production (ie money), but by dominating the cultural discourse too (ie a society’s intellectual map). And what is most important in relation to that cognitive map is not what is overtly stated and discussed – but what is left unstated, or ignored.”

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher

Gillian Tett " Eliminate financial double-think http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/96810a0e-8d8f-11de-93df-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2TVG2oiL2" Financial Times, August 20, 2009

Relation ships

“I was in the Oak Park theatre group. But we never had $90 000 to take an ad out! We were lucky if we had money for the glitter for the fucking poster!”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

Straight To Hell (2007)

“Gerrard will fit in with any club in the world. He’s one of the players in the world that have all what it takes to play for Real Madrid. I want to urge Gerrard to join Real Madrid. If you don’t play for Real Madrid you always feel that something is missing. There is nothing better than wearing Real Madrid’s jersey. This is a big opportunity for Gerrard. I’m not talking money wise, but victories wise. I’m sure that Gerrard has alot of respect towards Mourinho. Steven signing for Real Madrid will be perfect for him.”

Steven Gerrard (1980) English footballer

Kaka on Steven Gerrard, (August 2010)

World, Feeling, Victory, Perfection

“You talking baby money, I got yo baby money, kidnap yo bitch, get that how much you love yo lady money.”

Lil Wayne (1982) American rapper, singer, record executive and businessman

It's Good, written with Aubrey Graham, Jason Phillips, Andre Lyon, Marcello Valenzano, B. Pickens, Alan Parsons, and Eric Woolfson
2010s, Tha Carter IV (2011)

Love, Making love, Baby, Bitch

“Many bad men are rich, many good men are poor. But we will not exchange wealth for virtue along with them. One man has money now, another has money at another time. Money goes around, whereas virtue endures.”

Theognis of Megara (-570–-485 BC) Greek lyric poet active in approximately the sixth century BC

πολλοί τοι πλουτοῦσι κακοί, ἀγαθοὶ δὲ πένονται:
ἀλλ᾽ ἡμεῖς τούτοις οὐ διαμειψόμεθα
τῆς ἀρετῆς τὸν πλοῦτον, ἐπεὶ τὸ μὲν ἔμπεδον αἰεί,
χρήματα δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἄλλοτε ἄλλος ἔχει.
Source: Elegies, Lines 315-318, also attributed to Solon

Men, Bad luck, Time, Wealth

“The belief system that if you smiled hard enough into the face of God, you would eventually shit money.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

on Blairism.
Yeah, Yeah (2011)

God, Smile

“You’d be alone in the kitchen and twilight would be dwindling, and you could hear the far off cries of the other children playing nearby. You’d be alone in the kitchen because it was your special treat time, where the jelly would come out just for you, and your mother would appear at your side just as a vision of Laura Ashley print dress, smelling of magnolias and biscuits and put the jelly in front of you, and you would pull your chair in. Then the old fashioned bar of ice cream would come down, the one that had to be cut with a breadknife before the two sides were flanked with wafers. You would lift your little spoon up excitedly and winkle out that first divet of black jelly… AND THEN THE CAGE COMES DOWN! The cage with the Japanese fighting spiders inside, your mother strikes a match off her forearm and tells you to dance in the front room for money… You, you never forget that shit, I mean it never goes away.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Like, Totally (2006)

Children, Fashion, Appearance, Time

“Capitalism subordinates men to machines instead of using machines to liberate men from the burden of mechanical and repetitive work. it subordinates all social activities to the imperatives of an incessant drive for individual enrichment in terms of money, instead of gearing social life to the development of rich individualities and their social relations. The contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, inherent in every commodity, fully unfolds itself in this contradictory nature of capitalist machinery. When capitalism is not overthrown once it has created the material and social preconditions for a classless society of associated producers, this contradiction implies the possibility of a steadily increasing transformation of the forces of production into forces of destruction, in the most literal sense of the word: not only forces of destruction of wealth (crises and wars), of human wealth and human happiness, but also forces of destruction of life tout court.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

Introduction to Capital. Introduction to volume 1 (1976)

Life, Men, War, Happiness

“For myself, I would much prefer to be stuck with Kentucky in the NCAA Tournament, than stuck with George Bush in the White House. It is the difference between losing your wallet at a cock fight and losing all your credit cards forever, along with your job and your house and your ability to earn enough money to pay off your sports-gambling debts or even a six-pack on game day...”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

"What's Better Than the Tournament?' (18 March 2004)
2000s

Game, Sport, Fight, Housing

“A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and counter-current, of back-wash with other flows — the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc. Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other — two flows in what relationship?”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

from I have Nothing to Admit

Books

“Very old money was behind the Crow’s Nest. And enough of it that its Owners didn’t mind losing some every month to keep the place going. It was a kind of eleemosynary institution, created to serve not culture and not dukh, but a thing called the Purpose.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

And if Ty kept working there for another few decades, perhaps one of the Owners would sit him down one day in the Bolt Hole and deign to tell him what exactly the Purpose was.
"Five Thousand Years Later"
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

“Very often we will have the impression of having reached the end of the task, because we will find (or they will bring us) similar hairs of the one we seek; but since it is not known of any case where a hair has a knot in the middle without human hand intervention, we will almost always end up with the knot in question being a mere thickening of the caliber of the hair (although we do not know of any similar case) or a deposit of some silicate or any oxide produced by a long stay against a wet surface. It is probable that we will advance in this way through various sections of major and minor pipes, until we reach that place where no one will decide to penetrate: the main drain heading in the direction of the river, the torrential meeting of detritus in which no money, no boat, no bribe will allow us to continue the search.”

Julio Cortázar book Historias de cronopios y de famas

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Way, Search, Question

“Without wasting an instant, must start the hair recovery task. The first operation is reduced to dismantling the siphon from the sink to see if the hair has become hooked in any of the rugosities of the drain. If it is not found, it is necessary to expose the section of pipe that goes from the siphon to the main drainage pipe. It is certain that in this part will appear many hairs and we will have to count on the help of the rest of the family to examine them one by one in search of the knot. If it does not appear, the interesting problem of breaking the pipe down to the ground floor will arise, but this means a greater effort, because for eight or ten years we will have to work in a ministry or trading house to collect enough money to buy the four departments located under the one of my elder cousin, all that with the extraordinary disadvantage of what while working during those eight or ten years, the distressing feeling that the hair is no longer in the pipes anymore can not be avoided and that only by a remote chance remains hooked on some rusty spout of the drain.”

Julio Cortázar book Historias de cronopios y de famas

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Family, Feeling, Search, Problem

“Can you support the expense of a husband, hussy, in gaming, drinking and whoring? Have you money enough to carry on the daily quarrels of man and wife about who shall squander most? There are not many husbands and wives, who can bear the charges of plaguing one another in a handsome way.”

John Gay (1685–1732) English poet and playwright

Mrs. Peachum, Act I, sc. viii
The Beggar's Opera (1728)

Way, Game, Drink, Support

“If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.”

Sean Reardon American sociologist

No Rich Child Left Behind, 2013

Children, School, Family, Home

“But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting. High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.”

Sean Reardon American sociologist

No Rich Child Left Behind, 2013

Children, Education, School, Family

“But go ahead and judge DeSean for the company he keeps. While you’re at it, judge me, too, because I still live in Los Angeles, and my family does, too. We didn’t run from where we grew up. We aren’t afraid to be associated with the people who came up with us. We brought some of our money back and started charities and tried to help out a few guys who were with us when we were nobodies. I won’t apologize for that, and I suspect neither will DeSean when he’s back on the field doing what he’s always done: grinding through adversity.”

Richard Sherman (American football) (1988) American football player

Stardom Doesn’t Change Where You’re From (April 02, 2014)

People, Family, Angels, Guy

“Of the proportion, which the product of any region bears to the people, an estimate is commonly made according to the pecuniary price of the necessities of life; which is never certain, because it supposes what is far from truth, that the value of money is always the same, and so measures an unknown quantity by an uncertain standard. It is competent enough when the markets of the same country, at different times, and those times not too distant, are to be compared; but of very little use for the purpose of making one nation acquainted with the state of another.”

Samuel Johnson book A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

pp. 366-367. https://books.google.com/books?id=-6JfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA366 A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775)

Life, People, Truth, Making love

“It is in the animal part of your nature to be most impressed by what you can see and hear in the present—the latest news reports and trends, the opinions and actions of the people around you, whatever seems the most dramatic. This is what makes you fall for alluring schemes that promise quick results and easy money. This is also what makes you overreact to present circumstances—becoming overly exhilarated or panicky as events turn one direction or the other. Learn to measure people by the narrowness or breadth of their vision; avoid entangling yourself with those who cannot see the consequences of their actions, who are in a continual reactive mode. They will infect you with this energy. Your eyes must be on the larger trends that govern events, on that which is not immediately visible. Never lose sight of your long-term goals. With an elevated perspective, you will have the patience and clarity to reach almost any objective.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 6 : Elevate Your Perspective
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

People, Making love, Nature, Learning

“Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. It's not the tools that you have faith in — tools are just tools. They work, or they don't work. It's people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I'm still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long. … The world's clearly a better place. Individuals can now do things that only large groups of people with lots of money could do before. What that means is, we have much more opportunity for people to get to the marketplace — not just the marketplace of commerce but the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of publications, the marketplace of public policy. You name it. We've given individuals and small groups equally powerful tools to what the largest, most heavily funded organizations in the world have. And that trend is going to continue. You can buy for under $10,000 today a computer that is just as powerful, basically, as one anyone in the world can get their hands on.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

1990s, Rolling Stone interview (1994)

People, World, Faith, Idea

“The Church, poor old benighted creature, had at least taken care of that: the noble aspiring soul, not doomed to choke ignobly in its penuries, could at least run into the neighboring Convent, and there take refuge. Education awaited it there; strict training not only to whatever useful knowledge could be had from writing and reading, but to obedience, to pious reverence, self-restraint, annihilation of self,—really to human nobleness in many most essential respects. No questions asked about your birth, genealogy, quantity of money-capital or the like; the one question was, "Is there some human nobleness in you, or is there not?"”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

The poor neat-herd's son, if he were a Noble of Nature, might rise to Priesthood, to High-priesthood, to the top of this world,—and best of all, he had still high Heaven lying high enough above him, to keep his head steady, on whatever height or in whatever depth his way might lie!
1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The New Downing Street (April 15, 1850)

Education, Soul, Birth, Question

“The effect of our drug policy on the health of people who use illicit drugs stem from four basic problems: (1) a lack of information about medial hygiene, because our laws push drug users away from the medical professionals who can help them; (2) no quality control regarding either the strength or purity of illicit drugs; (3) the inability of many drug users to prepare and use injectable drugs under more medically hygienic conditions;… and (4) the enormous pressure on drug addicts to engage in dangerous criminal activity, such as prostitution, burglary and drug dealing, in order to get the money to purchase these artificially expensive drugs.”

James P. Gray (1945) American judge

Source: Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs, 2011, pp. 126-127

People, Health, Law, Problem

James P. Gray (1945) American judge

Source: Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs, 2011, p. 10

Fraud, Problem

“So much money is wasted in the drug war. I've had two congressman, Orange County congressman, tell me that there are lots of people in Washington who now believe that the drug war is not winnable but that it is imminently fundable… Where President Eisenhower once talked about the Military-Industrial Complex, we now have the Prison-Industrial Complex. It's the same thing, the same disease.”

James P. Gray (1945) American judge

“Hey, Wheres the Stoners, Druids and Ferret-Lovers?” O.C. Weekly (Feb. 24, 2004) https://ocweekly.com/hey-wheres-the-stoners-druids-and-ferret-lovers-6381081/

War, People, Disease

“I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

Exclusive Interview with F.A. Hayek by James U. Blanchard III, in Cato Policy Report (May/June 1984)
1980s and later

Way

“It's very beneficial to Mexico that these workers [come to the U. S.]. It relieves a lot of social tension. It empties out the countryside of the poor and the needy. It stops revolution from happening. And it's sending back a tidal wave of money. The remittance money from the United States is the second or third largest source of income in Mexico now. I guess you could argue that we have an extremely generous foreign policy…”

Luis Alberto Urrea (1955) Mexican-American poet

On how migrant workers benefit Mexico in some way in “INTERVIEWS: Luis Alberto Urrea” https://bookpage.com/interviews/8248-luis-alberto-urrea-nonfiction#.XcMKh7lKjcs in BookPage (April 2004)

Quotes about money page 34

Quotes about money
page 34