
“…in order to change poverty into wealth, one must start by displaying it.”
(420).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
139
Stray Birds (1916)
“…in order to change poverty into wealth, one must start by displaying it.”
(420).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
as quoted in "Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism" by Robert Skidelsy http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1256603608595872&url=www.geocities.com/monedem/keyn.html
Essays in Persuasion (1931), Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
Context: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease … But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
“Wealth owes its existence to labour, not labour to wealth.”
Leon MacLaren, Nature of Society and Other Essays
“The man who worships mere wealth is a snob.”
Thackeray (1879), Ch. 2
“No, wealth isn’t created at the top. It is merely devoured there.”
Source: The Greatest Salesman in the World
“Sometimes wealth and power merely created the desire for more of the same.”
Source: Behrooz Wolf (aka The Proteus Trilogy), Proteus In The Underworld (1995), Chapter 16 (p. 217)
"The Taste of the Age," The Saturday Evening Post (1958-07-26) [p. 290]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)