“No, wealth isn’t created at the top. It is merely devoured there.”

— Rutger Bregman

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Rutger Bregman 3

Dutch journalist, writer and historian 1988

Charles Sheffield book Proteus In The Underworld

Source: Behrooz Wolf (aka The Proteus Trilogy), Proteus In The Underworld (1995), Chapter 16 (p. 217)

“Time is the wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

139
Stray Birds (1916)

“Socialism takes and redistributes wealth, but it is utterly incapable of creating wealth.”

Leonard E. Read (1898–1983) American academic

Anything That's Peaceful (1964)
Context: Socialism depends upon and presupposes material achievements which socialism itself can never create. Socialism is operative only in wealth situations brought about by motes of production other than its own. Socialism takes and redistributes wealth, but it is utterly incapable of creating wealth.

“Win told me that one isn’t improved by being at the top of the mountain, one is improved by the climb.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Married By Morning

“The man who worships mere wealth is a snob.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

Thackeray (1879), Ch. 2

“… a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Simon, H. A. (1971) "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" in: Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore. MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 40–41.
1960s-1970s
Context: In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.