Honore de Balzac Quotes
Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
Honore de Balzac, 1799-1850, French Writer, Quoted in The Washington Post, September 22, 2013
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
There were few if any consumer protection laws in those days and many wealthy aristocrats made their money by taking advantage of the poor. They were the landowners, bankers, financiers and often the industrialists. Shaw was a sarcastic social critic and this is a typical line he gave his upper class characters. Today, we have more controls on business and finance, and many wealthy business people have gotten that way by providing great value to the consumers and being honest. However, we still have large numbers of wealthy members of society who do make their money from the poor and middle class by unethical and often illegal means. In the aftermath of the Meltdown of 2008. hundreds of thousands of the homes of the working poor and middle class were foreclosed by the major banks forging the legal documentation for the foreclusures. Millions of consumer contracts are issued that even a PhD cannot understand the terms of without special legal and financial training. There is even a legal definition of a salesperson lying to make a sale which is so commonplace that our law excuses it and calls it "puffing". However, there has been over time, improvement over Shaw's era.
See {625339} and {622808} for similar conservative views.
Describing the census debates and lawsuits regarding correct counting methodologies:
See {629121} for the Christian religious quotation regarding the "eye of a needle."
Clark, after becoming one of the richest men in America, wanted to go into National Politics, but most people hated him so he could never win elected office. At the time, Montana selected their Senators by a vote of the State Legislature. So Clark bribed enough members of the legislature to become the Senator. However, the bribery scheme became a public scandal and the Senate refused to seat him. So the legislature had another vote in the next legislative session and Clark won again, and that time no one had the evidence of the bribes. But then, more about Clark became known, and he just served the one term.
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.
