Unearned Wealth Quotes

No one earns $100 million. You steal $100 million.

There is an unwritten social rule now that you can harangue the wealthy to give money away, but you mustn't ask how the money was made. There are no galas celebrating the money people knew better than to seek. Charity begins after profit.

Women of a selected class, by the use of slaves and servants have become inactive, the mere recipients of values, no longer creators but "feeding on unearned wealth." This hurts their nature and debases the social fabric. If a woman does no labor in her home which could properly make her self-supporting outside that home she is in duty bound to do something outside her home to justify her claim to support.

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.

There's just a lot of really young, entitled people. I don't think a lot of these young people have to work very hard. They're found on YouTube and, boom, thrown into the studio, so they think they can get anything they want.

The artist is today and has been for many years, despite his absence of merit, simply a spoiled child. So many honors, so much money bestowed on men without souls and without education.

Great good fortune coming suddenly and unexpectedly tends to make a people insolent

Bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.

Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.

There are some writers who don't write about people who do jobs. I'm not going to name them, but you watch one of their films, or you read one of their books, and you think, 'What job do they do?' They seem to have a nice house and a nice income. How have they got it?

These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest.

For all riches come from iniquity, and unless one were to lose another could not gain. Hence the common adage seems to me to be very true: The rich man is unjust or the heir of an unjust one.

Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economising

I hope I don't sound like an old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud, but when I hear about people making vast fortunes without doing any productive work or contributing anything to society, my reaction is: “How can I get in on that?

The Landlord is a gentleman who does not earn his wealth. He has a host of agents and clerks that receive for him. He does not even take the trouble to spend his wealth. He has a host of people around him to do the actual spending. He never sees it until he comes to enjoy it. His sole function, his chief pride, is the stately consumption of wealth produced by others.

I'm going to end up with a lot more money than I feel like I'm entitled to, given how hard I work.

No writer has a right to make that much money. Indeed, without diabolical assistance, no writer can.

When a fortune comes without calling, it's apt to leave without asking.

There's a confusing message that we're sending people now, that lots of money can made off of simply having a lot of followers and having no discernible skills or talents. I don't know if I'm in a minority or if it's just a guilty pleasure for people, but I think the preponderance of reality shows is of great detriment to human beings.

It seems to me that the least deserving recipients of wealth are inheritors. Further, there are many indications that inheritors often have trouble adjusting to their unearned inheritance. An inheritance tax would de facto help remedy this.

Yeah, it's unfair that you can get judged by something you didn't do, but it's also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn't work for.

There are many of our so-called captains on industry who, if the truth were told, and a shorter and uglier word were not unpermissible, are little better than malefactors of great wealth.

He despised causeless affection, just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved.