“Malefactors of great wealth.”

Phrase first used in a speech at Provincetown, Massachusetts (20 August 1907)
1900s

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Malefactors of great wealth." by Theodore Roosevelt?
Theodore Roosevelt photo
Theodore Roosevelt 445
American politician, 26th president of the United States 1858–1919

Related quotes

James Branch Cabell photo
Paul Krugman photo

“With great wealth comes great pettiness.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Warren Versus the Petty Plutocrats https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/opinion/elizabeth-warren-wealth-tax.html (September 30, 2019)
The New York Times Columns

“Great wealth breeds great arrogance.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: The Margarets (2007), Chapter 14, “I Am Margaret/On Earth” (p. 115)

Henri Lefebvre photo

“Everything great and splendid is founded on power and wealth.”

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) French philosopher

From Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1 (1947/1991)
Context: Everything great and splendid is founded on power and wealth. They are the basis of beauty. This is why the rebel and the anarchic protester who decries all of history and all the works of past centuries because he sees in them only the skills and the threat of domination is making a mistake. He sees alienated forms, but not the greatness within. The rebel can only see to the end of his own ‘private’ consciousness, which he levels against everything human, confusing the oppressors with the oppressed masses, who were nevertheless the basis and the meaning of history and past works. Castles, palaces, cathedrals, fortresses, all speak in their various ways of the greatness and the strength of the people who built them and against whom they were built. This real greatness shines through the fake grandeur of rulers and endows these buildings with a lasting ‘beauty’. The bourgeoisie is alone in having given its buildings a single, over-obvious meaning, impoverished, deprived of reality: that meaning is abstract wealth and brutal domination; that is why it has succeeded in producing perfect ugliness and perfect vulgarity. The man who denigrates the past, and who nearly always denigrates the present and the future as well, cannot understand this dialectic of art, this dual character of works and of history. He does not even sense it. Protesting against bourgeois stupidity and oppression, the anarchic individualist is enclosed in ‘private’ consciousness, itself a product of the bourgeois era, and no longer understands human power and the community upon which that power is founded. The historical forms of this community, from the village to the nation, escape him. He is, and only wants to be, a human atom (in the scientifically archaic sense of the word, where ‘atom’ meant the lowest isolatable reality). By following alienation to its very extremes he is merely playing into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Embryonic and unconscious, this kind of anarchism is very widespread. There is a kind of revolt, a kind of criticism of life, that implies and results in the acceptance of this life as the only one possible. As a direct consequence this attitude precludes any understanding of what is humanly possible.

Leo Tolstoy photo

“Wealth is a great sin in the eyes of God. Poverty is a great sin in the eyes of man.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 86

Jane Roberts photo
Tenzin Gyatso photo

“Great wealth can only be obtained through deception and corruption.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

37 Practices of the Bodhisattva, teaching at Bodhgaya https://www.lamayeshe.com/article/thirty-seven-practices-bodhisattva (January 1974).

Adam Smith photo

“In public, as well as in private expences, great wealth may, perhaps, frequently be admitted as an apology for great folly.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter V, p. 563.

Dante Alighieri photo

“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

Eckhart Tolle photo

Related topics