The dollar sign is the only sign in which the modern man appears to have any real faith.
Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.
If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.
The only real struggle in the history of the world . . . is between the vested interest and social justice.
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
It’s all very well to run around saying regulation is bad, get the government off our backs, etc. Of course our lives are regulated. When you come to a stop sign, you stop; if you want to go fishing, you get a license; if you want to shoot ducks, you can shoot only three ducks. The alternative is dead bodies at the intersection, no fish, and no ducks. OK?
Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air, and water. Men can employ it as a tool, or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money?
Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. . . . Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.
The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
On the deepest level, problems such as war and starvation are not solved by economics and politics alone. Their source is prejudice and fear in the human heart — and their solution also lies in the human heart.
Money does not corrupt people. What corrupts people is lack of affection. . . . Money is simply the bandage which wounded people put over their wounds.
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart. . . . This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of hearts, there remains . . . an uprooted small corner of evil.
If you look at history, even recent history, you see that there is indeed progress. . . . Over time, the cycle is clearly, generally upwards. And it doesn’t happen by laws of nature. And it doesn’t happen by social laws. . . . It happens as a result of hard work by dedicated people who are willing to look at problems honestly, to look at them without illusions, and to go to work chipping away at them, with no guarantee of success — in fact, with a need for a rather high tolerance for failure along the way, and plenty of disappointments.
Justice without love is not justice. Love without justice is not love.
Let there be such oneness between us that when one cries, the other tastes salt.
