Money Quotes

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments; any enlargement of wishes is therefore equally destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession, and he that teaches another to long for what he never shall obtain is no less an enemy to his quiet than if he had robbed him of part of his patrimony.

- Samuel Johnson¹

1. The Rambler, No. 163 (October 8, 1751) [↩]

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 [↩]

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

- Richard Phillips Feynman¹

1. Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics, Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher, pg. xx [↩]

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 [↩]

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 [↩]

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 [↩]

Semper inops quicumque cupit.

Translates to: Whoever desires is always poor.

- Claudian¹

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

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