Poverty is not wholly a personal failure. It also represents the failure of an economic system. And the remedy is not wholly one of charity, but of political and economic action. Poverty is a reflection also on those who are not poor.
—Brooks Atkinson
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him that if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
—Mary "Mother" Jones
Don't you know that if people could bottle the air they would? Don't you know there would be an American Air-bottling Association? And don't you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath if they could not pay for air?
—Robert Ingersoll
The truth is, we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless.
—Woodrow Wilson
The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by our real problems—the problems of life and of human relations.
—John Maynard Keynes
A consultant is someone who saves his client almost enough to pay his fee.
—Arnold H. Glasow
When you go to work, if your name is on the building, you’re rich. If your name is on your desk, you’re middle-class. If your name is on your shirt, you’re poor.
—Rich Hall
There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, “That person I see is a savage monster”; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the ceo of some major corporation what he does, he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving twenty hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different.
—Noam Chomsky
There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey.
—John Ruskin
Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be "uneconomic" you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.
—E. F. Schumacher
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
—Evan Esar
There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.
—Judith Martin
Middle age is when a guy keeps turning off lights for economical rather than romantic reasons.
—Lillian Gordy Carter
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?
—Kelvin Throop III
Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.
—Dorothy L. Sayers