Money Quotes

Never keep up with Joneses: drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper.

- Quentin Crisp¹

1. As quoted in The Naked Civil Servant, p. ii [↩]

What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun.

- Winston Churchill¹

1. From Liberalism and the Social Problem, pg. 87 -  Speech in Dundee, Scotland (1908-10-10) [↩]

Stop trying to keep up with the Joneses because they’re broke.

Source:

Nihil tam munitum quod non expugnari pecunia possit.

Translates to: Nothing is so fortified that it can’t be conquered with money.

- Attributed to Cicero¹

1. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Latin_proverbs [↩]

The main thing is that the more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

- Leo Tolstoy¹

1. Help For The Starving [↩]

On en trouve [l'argent] toujours quand il s’agit d’aller faire tuer des hommes sur la frontière: il n’y en a plus quand il faut les sauver.

Translates to: Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to be destroyed: when the object is to preserve them, it is no longer so.

- Voltaire¹

1. Œuvres complètes, p. 136 [↩]

Money has in our time completely lost that desirable significance as a representative of labour; such a significance it has only exceptionally, for as a general rule it has become a right or a possibility for exploiting the labour of others.

The dissemination of money, or credit, and of all kinds of monetary tokens more and more confirms this meaning of money.  Money is the possibility or the right to exploit the labours of others.  Money is a new form of slavery, which differs form the old only in being impersonal, and in freeing people from all the human relations of the slave.

- Leo Tolstoy¹

1. From What Shall We Say? in the Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy [↩]

You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your [...] khakis. We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

- Tyler Durden in Fight Club

It’s just, when you buy furniture, you tell yourself: that’s it, that’s the last sofa I’m gonna need. No matter what else happens, I’ve got that sofa problem handled. I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent, a wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I was so close to being complete.

- Narrator in Fight Club

Semper inops quicumque cupit.

Translates to: Whoever desires is always poor.

- Claudian¹

1. Claudian: in two volumes, p. 40, line 200 [↩]