W. H. Auden Quotes

The competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich.

This contempt for money is a trick developed by the rich to keep the poor without it.

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

Choice dependent on wealth; those are the Tory words.

I think America has dealt with - I mean, this is simplistic, and of course I don't live in America - but the impression I get is that there is not a kind of obligation to dislike those who are better off or be frightened of those who are worse off.

If we're not going to tax the rich anymore, we're going to create class warfare.

The fact is that, except for those very few whose wealth is overwhelmingly or entirely inherited, the more affluent have usually worked harder than the less affluent.

I don't like inherited wealth.

I hear all this, you know, 'Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.' No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own - nobody.

The men of middling property and poor men can never be safe in a mixed representation with the men of over-grown property.

The rich are few everywhere, the poor many.

The poor generally follow behavior patterns established by the rich.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

Maybe it’s that silver spoon in his [Mitt Romney’s] mouth that keeps him from seeing why the middle class doesn’t pull itself up by its bootstraps, like he did when Daddy loaned him his first million dollars.

What is called sound economics is very often what mirrors the needs of the respectably affluent.

The one think I hate about rich people, is that they really think that they work harder than poor people.

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

I am the typical British aspiring working class. To be called 'elite' by people who have inherited wealth and run hedge funds or worked in the City of London, I don't criticise them for it, but the idea is frankly laughable. Just ridiculous.

Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.

I am not biased against the rich because they are rich, but the most lively people are those without money who would like to have some

The rich are different than you and me: they have more money and they have more power.

It says anybody can make it, because we're all on a level playing field. But we're not on a level playing field. That 's precisely the point, and that's what the rich don't want to look at. They don't want to recognize that they're not producing wealth at all. They're hoarding wealth. That's different.

Some people's money is merited and other people's is inherited.

Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.