Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don't have it.
—Louise Erdrich
Making money ain't nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner, but you get sick just like the next cat, and when you die you're just as graveyard dead.
—Louis Armstrong
Anyone who can live on welfare should be courted by Wall Street. He is a financial genius.
—Joanna Clark
I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently, worked hard, spent honestly, saved honestly, gave honest value for money, put back more than they took out, and told no lies. This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.
—Anita Roddick
The darkest hour in the history of any young man is when he sits down to study how to get money without honestly earning it.
—Horace Greeley
If all the rich men in the world divided up their money amongst themselves, there wouldn't be enough to go round.
—Christina Stead
I put a dollar in a change machine. Nothing happened.
—George Carlin
Excuse me, sir; I cannot consent to receive pay for services I do not render.
—Robert E. Lee, explaining his rejection of a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year salary to act as titular head of an insurance company after the Civil War
You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself. I don't say this as a condemnation—I need regular reminders to stop feeling sorry for myself too. I'm going to address you bluntly, but it's a directness that rises from my compassion for you, not my judgement of you. Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.
—Cheryl Strayed in Tiny Beautiful Things
Poverty made me feel weak, as if I were coming down with an awful, debilitating, communicable disease—the disease of being without money. Instead of going to the hospital, you went to the poor farm. The difference was, you never got well at the poor farm.
—Faith Sullivan
It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.
—Bill Vaughan
I get so tired listening to one million dollars here, one million dollars there; it's so petty.
—Imelda Marcos, during her trial for embezzlement
First secure an independent income, then practice virtue.
—Greek Proverb
Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
—Ronald Reagan
I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water is too polluted to drink, the commuters are losing out in the struggle to get in and out of the city, the streets are filthy, the schools are so bad that the young perhaps wisely stay away, and the hoodlums roll citizens for some of the dollars they saved in the tax cut.
—John Kenneth Galbraith