Sunday, January 4, 2009 – The Economy Collapses
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
Money is the sinew of love as well as war. ~ Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732
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
A woman’s mink coat represents the sacrifice of a lot of little animals, including her husband. ~ Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966
Money doesn’t talk, it swears. ~ Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”
When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes. ~ Henry Miller
Part of the $10 million I spent on gambling, part on booze and part on women. The rest I spent foolishly. ~ George Raft
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
Just Above Sunset 