Douglas William Jerrold Quotes

Since the equality of fortunes reigns in the North, and slavery does not exist there, man finds himself absorbed with those same material wants which the white man disdains in the South. He knows it admirable to take advantage of nature and men to produce riches.

Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect.

Money is the most important thing in the world, you know. Money can buy you happiness, and I don't care what anyone else thinks.

I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.

Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

From this process has emerged a parallel process of translating traditional working and living values into a new political and economic power - a power increasingly based upon the strength of money and those material things money can purchase.

Class isn't something you buy. Look at you. You have a $500 suit on and you're still a lowlife.

In the eighties, we had the ladies who lunch, the power lunch - everything was power. At the beginning of the nineties, things changed.

Coming from where I came from, it was unimaginable to ever be wealthy. That was just too far out of my reach.

Nowadays nothing but money counts: a fortune brings honors, friendships; the poor man everywhere lies low.

Money doesn't buy class.

The Porsche was just a vehicle to get to another place. I used it to change people's perceptions of me. I had grown up really middle class. USC was filled with elitists, richies who would go skiing every weekend. So I pretended like I was part of that world - to be accepted.

At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.

I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human being become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of respectability at a commensurate speed.

What makes this country different is that we have a great middle class.

If Eleanor Roosevelt has her way, how are we going to tell the rich from the poor?

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

When I ascended from the depths of the working class to the middle class, the higher I got, the more dishonesty I found.

I'm not going to do class warfare; I want to be wealthy.

All artists are socialists until they see another artist with a bigger house than theirs.

Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he's a friendless sixth-grader.

Got a house on the hill, cost a couple of mill, Juicy J got bank like Uncle Phil.

Anyone, without any great penetration, may distinguish the dispositions consequent on wealth; for its possessors are insolent and overbearing, from being tainted in a certain way by the getting of their wealth. For they are affected as though they possessed every good; since wealth is a sort of standard of the worth of other things; whence every thing seems to be purchasable by it.

I think the pearls - one is a necklace, and another you have five hundred pounds of pearls, which may be one million pearls in a bowl - really show a kind of [society] condition.

Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.