Dealing With Hard Times

Sunday, June 3, 2012 – Dealing With Hard Times

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we now know that it is bad economics. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie – that one party can gain only at the expense of another. ~ Milton Friedman

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence. ~ Hannah Arendt

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless. ~ Sinclair Lewis

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. ~ Thomas Sowell

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. ~ Edmund Burke

If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. ~ George Bernard Shaw

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today. ~ Laurence J. Peter

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied… but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing. ~ John Berger

Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit. ~ Eli Khamarov, Lives of the Cognoscenti

We didn’t starve, but we didn’t eat chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was. ~ Bernard Malamud

The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time. ~ Willem de Kooning

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. ~ Henry David Thoreau

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. ~ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929

There is some magic in wealth, which can thus make persons pay their court to it, when it does not even benefit themselves. How strange it is, that a fool or knave, with riches, should be treated with more respect by the world, than a good man, or a wise man in poverty! ~ Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1764

If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn’t be enough to go around. ~ Christina Stead, House of All Nations (1938) “Credo”

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to. ~ Dorothy Parker

I’m living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart. ~ e e cummings

The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it. ~ Edith Wharton

Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy. ~ Groucho Marx

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated. ~ H. L. Mencken

If you can count your money, you don’t have a billion dollars. ~ J. Paul Getty

I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something. ~ Jackie Mason

Money can’t buy happiness, but neither can poverty. ~ Leo Rosten

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. ~ Oscar Wilde, The Model Millionaire, 1912

Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That’s how rich I want to be. ~ Rita Rudner

No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather. ~ Michael Pritchard

Money can’t buy friends, but it can get you a better class of enemy. ~ Spike Milligan

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. ~ Woody Allen

Life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills. ~ Clifford Odets

I don’t like money, actually, but it quiets my nerves. ~ Joe Louis

I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money. ~ Pablo Picasso

It’s a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money. ~ Albert Camus

I’m so poor I can’t even pay attention. ~ Ron Kittle

Business is the art of extracting money from another man’s pocket without resorting to violence. ~ Max Amsterdam

Money is human happiness in the abstract; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in the concrete, sets his whole heart on money. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851

When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes. ~ Henry Miller

What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money. ~ Henry Youngman

From these cities they would go on again, by the roads of vines and olives, through squalid villages, where there was not a hovel without a gap in its filthy walls, not a window with a whole inch of glass or paper; where there seemed to be nothing to support life, nothing to eat, nothing to make, nothing to grow, nothing to hope, nothing to do but die. ~ Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of. ~ Confucius

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion. ~ John Maynard Keynes