Money is a dream. It is a piece of paper on which is imprinted in invisible ink the dream of all the things it will buy, all the trinkets and all the power over others.
No social system in any country will bring us happiness, health, and prosperity unless it is inspired by something greater than materialism.
Credit has done a thousand times more to enrich mankind than all the gold mines in the world. It has exalted labor, stimulated manufacture, and pushed commerce over every sea.
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.
Privilege, almost by definition, requires that someone pay the price for its enjoyment.
Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave driver.
Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel-cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon envy and avarice.
People keep telling us about their love affairs, when what we really want to know is how much money they make and how they manage on it.
I had a hard time at the bank today. I tried to take out a loan, and they pulled a real attitude with me. Apparently they won’t accept the voices in my head as references.
Now that he was rich he was not thought ignorant anymore, but simply eccentric.
Anglo-Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s financial affairs were constantly in disorder, and debt was a chronic state with him. “Thank God, that’s settled,” he is reported to have said, handing over an IOU to a creditor.
The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment of debts is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities.
There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.
The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it back in your pocket.
The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money.
If money had been the way to save the world, Christ himself would have been rich.
It cuts us off from life, from vitality, from the alive sun and the alive earth, as nothing can. Nothing, not even the most fanatical dogmas of an ironbound religion, can insulate us from the inrush of life and inspiration as money can.
It is very wrong for people to feel deeply sad when they lose some money, yet when they waste the precious moments of their lives, they do not have the slightest feeling of repentance.
We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity — but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our “biography,” our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards. . . . It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?
Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn’t that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?
