Extracts
About Money
Selected from the Spring 2008 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
The populace may hiss me, but when I go home and think of my money, I applaud myself.
—Horace, c. 25 BC
The character which results from wealth is that of a prosperous fool.
—Aristotle, c. 322 BC
Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life.
—Adam Smith, 1776
Money, the cause of much mischief in the world, is the cause of most quarrels between fathers and sons; the former commonly thinking that they cannot give too little, and the latter that they cannot have enough.
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1750
What is really desired under the name of riches is, essentially, power over men.
—John Ruskin, 1860
It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another.
—John C. Calhoun, 1836
Of the two—the vote and the money—the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.
—Virginia Woolf, 1918
Money, not morality, is the principle of commercial nations.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1810
Gold and silver, where they are employed merely as the instruments of exchange and alienation, have been not improperly denominated dead stock; but when deposited in banks to become the basis of a paper circulation, which takes their character and place as the signs or representatives of value, they then acquire life, or, in other words, an active and productive quality.
—Alexander Hamilton, 1790
You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!
—William Jennings Bryan, 1896
He that serves God for money will serve the Devil for better wages.
—Roger L’Estrange, 1692
Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability, and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted. I lifted them from your spirit. I enabled Barbara to become Major Barbara, and I saved her from the crime of poverty.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1905
Business? Why, it’s very simple: business is other people’s money.
—Alexandre Dumas, 1857
The only foundation of real business is service.
—Henry Ford, 1922
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
—Samuel Johnson, 1776
No man will take counsel, but every man will take money: therefore money is better than counsel.
—Jonathan Swift, 1702
We all feel, sincerely and without misgiving, that we are the more lifted up in spirit for having, even in the privacy of our own household, eaten our daily meal by the help of hand-wrought silver utensils, from hand-painted china (often of dubious artistic value) laid on high-priced table linen. Any retrogression from the standard of living which we are accustomed to regard as worthy in this respect is felt to be a grievous violation of our human dignity.
—Thorstein Veblen, 1899
Money is mourned with deeper sorrow than friends or kindred.
—Juvenal, 128
Remember that time is money.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1748
How unhappy the rich are in this life—and they never get to heaven after death.
—Heinrich Heine, 1841
There was something still better beyond, then—more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the “something beyond.”
—Edith Wharton, 1913
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
—The Gospel According to Matthew, c. 30
The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.
—Andrew Carnegie, 1889
They cry fie now upon men engaged in play, but I should like to know how much more honorable their modes of livelihood are than ours. The broker of the Exchange who bulls and bears, and buys and sells, and dabbles with lying loans, and trades on state secrets, what is he but a gamester?
—William Makepeace Thackeray, c. 1763
Indeed, even according to ancient Babylonian doctrine, gold is “the feces of Hell.”
—Sigmund Freud, 1908
When I consider any social system that prevails in the modern world, I can’t, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests under the pretext of organizing society.
—Thomas More, 1516
Mammon, n. The god of the world’s leading religion. His chief temple is in the holy city of New York.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1911
‘Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city: for in one hour is thy judgment come.’ And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her, for no man buyeth their merchandise anymore: the merchandise of gold and silver and precious stones.
—John the Apostle, c. 70
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ABOUT MONEY
Spring 2008