“Malefactors of great wealth.”
Phrase first used in a speech at Provincetown, Massachusetts (20 August 1907)
1900s
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Theodore Roosevelt 445
American politician, 26th president of the United States 1858–1919Related quotes

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

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

“Wealth is a great sin in the eyes of God. Poverty is a great sin in the eyes of man.”
Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 86

“Great wealth can only be obtained through deception and corruption.”
37 Practices of the Bodhisattva, teaching at Bodhgaya https://www.lamayeshe.com/article/thirty-seven-practices-bodhisattva (January 1974).

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

“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