The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest "functionaire" possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work.
The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, no worse, for a people than another.
6th Baron Byron
Socialism for rich bankers and capitalism for everyone else.
I was not the son of a worker or lacking in material or social resources for a relatively comfortable existence; I could say I miraculously escaped wealth.
I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks.
We've never been people that go around and confront people that have been financially successful and say, 'We hate you. We envy you because of how well you're doing.'
Here's a guy that inherited $200 million. If he hadn't inherited $200 million, you know where Donald Trump would be right now?
Money...buys privacy, silence. The less money you have, the noisier it is; the thinner your walls, the closer your neighbors.... The first thing you notice when you step into the house or apartment of a rich person is how quiet it is.
I remember in 1990, there were five of us making $3 million a year. When guys passed us, we didn't cry. Why would we cry? You didn't get mad when someone got $6 million. Or $8 million.
The poor man must walk to get meat for his stomach, the rich man to get a stomach to his meat.
I happen to be fortunate: I live in San Francisco, and I can afford a $600 phone. Or two of them!
Hollywood people are filled with guilt: white guilt, liberal guilt, money guilt. They feel bad that they're so rich, they feel they don't work that much for all that money - and they don't, for the amount of money they make.
The rich are few everywhere, the poor many.
The poor generally follow behavior patterns established by the rich.
People say law but they mean wealth.
We may feel the pain of falling back from a level of affluence to which we have grown accustomed, but most people in developed countries are still, by historical standards, extraordinarily well off.
Boarding school didn't feel like my world, I felt like an alien; people there had a lot of money.
There's a very small percentage of people that take limos to school and have $2000 handbags - no one in my high school had that!
Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard.
The 400 of us [the richest Americans] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you're in the luckiest 1 percent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 percent.
Even though Mr. Trump is a billionaire, he is still able to relate to average working men and women. The billionaire gets along with the bricklayer.
My parents are very successful, and I went to the nicest private school in the Seattle area. I was lucky. But I never had any trust funds of any kind, though my dad did pay my tuition at Harvard, which was quite expensive.
Wealth makes an ugly person beautiful to look on and an incoherent speech eloquent; and wealth alone can enjoy pleasure even in sickness and can conceal its miseries.
Our nation’s political spectrum is not left to right, but top to bottom. People can locate themselves on this rich-to-poor pole for this is not a theoretical positioning: It’s based on our actual experience with money and power.
