False Prosperity Quotes

Paper money is like dram-drinking, it relieves for a moment by deceitful sensation, but gradually diminishes the natural heat, and leaves the body worse than it found it. Were not this the case, and could money be made of paper at pleasure, every sovereign in Europe would be as rich as he pleased. But the truth is, that it is a bubble and the attempt vanity. Nature has provided the proper materials for money: gold and silver, and any attempt of ours to rival her is ridiculous.

POVERTY, n. A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. Its victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues and by their faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a prosperity where they believe these to be unknown.

Money is a bubble that never pops. It's a consensus hallucination.

Riches seldom make their owners rich.

The economy is a ponzi scheme. People are working harder than they ever have for less wages, but we have so many bobbles because manufacturing has come up so quickly over the past hundred years that people have the illusion of wealth.

Where do people earn the Per Capita Income? More than one poor starving soul would like to know. In our countries, numbers live better than people. How many people prosper in times of prosperity? How many people find their lives developed by development?

When you can count your money, you ai'nt got none.

Debt gives you the ability to look like you’re winning when you’re not.

It was self-serving politicians who convinced recent generations of Americans that we could all stand in a circle with our hands in each other’s pockets and somehow get rich.

Greenspan's eventual explanation for the growing gap between stock prices and actual productivity was that, fortuitously, the laws of nature had changed -- humanity had reached a happy stage of history where bullshit could be used as rocket fuel.

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings...but no one has for those reasons yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest.

I say that a Christian congregation can survive and often appear to prosper in the community by the exercise of human talent and without any touch from the Holy Spirit! All that religious activity and the dear people will not know anything better until the great and terrible day when our self-employed talents are burned with fire and only that which was wrought by the Holy Ghost will stand forever!

I was on paper earning more money and having more success than I'd ever had. And it was also the most miserable I've ever been. When those things collided, I realised something was off. That's when I started poking around to figure out what was wrong.

That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin

For men in a state of freedom had thatch for their shelter, while slavery dwells beneath marble and gold.

Money will never make you happy and happy will never make you money.

O you proud Christians, wretched souls and small,/ Who by the dim lights of your twisted minds/ Believe you prosper even as you fall,/ Can you not see that we are worms, each one/ Born to become the angelic butterfly/ That flies defenseless to the Judgement Throne?

Whenever money is in the game, it can suffocate anything and anyone else, and I think people have been misled by money, or the dream of money, or selling the dream that if you've made it money-wise, you've made a life. Which is a lie. You don't get happiness by money.

To appear rich, we become poor.

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. The earthquake means good business for construction workers, and cholera improves the business of physicians, pharmacists, and undertakers; but no one has for that reason yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest.

We read on the foreheads of those who are surrounded by a foolish luxury, that fortune sells what she is thought to give.

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.

How often has not the parallel been drawn and the golden age of the Roman Empire, when the external brilliancy of life likewise dazzled the eye, notwithstanding that the social diagnosis could yield no other verdict than 'rotten to the very core'?

No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.

I had many of the trappings of success. I was a lawyer. I drove a nice car and I had nice things. But "things" don't make a rich life.