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“I remember clearly the deaths of three men. One was the richest man of the century, who, having clawed his way to wealth through the souls and bodies of men, spent many years trying to buy back the love he had forfeited and by that process performed great service to the world and, perhaps, had much more than balanced the evils of his rise. I was on a ship when he died. The news was posted on the bulletin board, and nearly everyone recieved the news with pleasure. Several said, "Thank God that son of a bitch is dead."

Then there was a man, smart as Satan, who, lacking some perception of human dignity and knowing all too well every aspect of human weakness and wickedness, used his special knowledge to warp men, to buy men, to bribe and threaten and seduce until he found himself in a position of great power. He clothed his motives in the names of virtue, and I have wondered whether he ever knew that no gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man can only hate his briber. When this man died the nation rang with praise...

There was a third man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, "What can we do now?" How can we go on without him?"

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, mo matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror....we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“If better conditions will make the poor more fit to govern themselves, why should not better conditions already make the rich more fit to govern them? On the ordinary environment argument the matter is fairly manifest. The comfortable class must be merely our vanguard in Utopia...Is there any answer to the proposition that those who have had the best opportunities will probably be our best guides? Is there any answer to the argument that those who have breathed clean air had better decide for those who have breathed foul? As far as I know, there is only one answer, and that answer is Christianity. Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man's environment, but in man. Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment...Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“...the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“And the priests looked down into the pit of injustice and they turned their faces away and said, 'Our kingdom is not as the kingdom of this world. Our life on earth is but a pilgrimage. The soul lives on humility and patience,' at the same time screwing the poor from their last centime. They settled down among their treasures and ate and drank with princes and to the starving they said, 'Suffer. Suffer as he suffered on the cross for it is the will of God.'

And anyone believes what they hear over and over again, so the poor instead of bread made do with a picture of the bleeding, scourged, and nailed-up Christ and prayed to that image of their helplessness. And the priests said, 'Raise your hands to heaven and bend your knees and bear your suffering without complaint. Pray for those that torture you, for prayer and blessing are the only stairways which you can climb to paradise.'

And so they chained down the poor in their ignorance so that they wouldn't stand up and fight their bosses who ruled in the name of the lie of divine right.”
― Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

“The hefty figure of M. de Guermantes was seated beside her, proud and Olympian. One got the impression that the notion of his vast riches was omnipresent in all his limbs, giving him an extraordinary density, as though they had been smelted in a crucible into a single human ingot to create this man who was worth so much.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“Hoarding kings are to be pitied in their lifetime
when they can't take their riches
to the grave.

- Gwallawg is Other”
― Taliesin, Taliesin Poems

“People live in different worlds. There's a rich world, there's a poor world, and there's an extremely poor. The one you dwell is determined by the outcome of your sacrifice.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“You put yourself in a tight corner of failure if you think "it's only the rich that get richer while the poor get poorer". No! Something good can come out from you no matter who you are, what you have done and where you have been to!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“Every time the rich ignore the poor, the rich become poorer! Poorest is the person who has all the means to help others but chooses not to!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Patriotism, as a rational choice, is the ideology of the rich, but for the masses this is just an irrational attitude to public life.”
― Elmar Hussein

“Stripping the rich of their plumage is undiluted disgrace. The poor who were at their service are now opportune to smear their plummeted status.”
― Vincent Okay Nwachukwu, Weighty 'n' Worthy African Proverbs - Volume 1

“Not that anybody is saying that these people have no trouble.
Merely that it is trouble with a gold-flecked beautiful banner.

Nobody is saying that these people do not ultimately cease to be. And
Sometimes their passings are even more painful than ours.
It is just that so often they live till their hair is white.
They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers. . . .”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Annie Allen

“Ils y doivent travailler devant la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues, et de voler du pain.”
― Anatole France, Le Lys rouge suivi de Le Jardin d'Épicure

“He recognized the world for what it is - a place where laws and morality have no power over the rich - and he saw in wealth the ultima ratio mundi.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“It is no exaggeration to say that the rich own most of what there is that is not nailed down.”
― Paul Robert Wolff

“The stunning problem with mindset is sometimes the rich are cheap while the poor are expensive.”
― Martin Uzochukwu Ugwu

“You speak with little pity, my man.'
'I'm like the gentry, then. Like the parsons, and the justices, and the lords and ladies. Like that proud besom down to Blandamer.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show

“I was a stranger in the strange land of the rich and was coming to see that they do things differently there.”
― Clifford Thurlow, Gigolo: Inside the Secret World of the Super Rich

“You can be sure that the elite want to promote the liberal position as much as possible â€� because they can never be toppled by liberals. Liberals have been bred by the elite to be bland, banal, comfortable Last Men and Ignavi. The elite fear only the radicals â€� because the radicals are prepared to get their hands dirty. Why are there no statues of Robespierre? Because the elite despise him above all others, and they have succeeded in making the world ashamed of and disgusted by radicals. Like everything else, there are good radicals and bad radicals, but without radicals nothing ever changes. Why are the elite still in charge after destroying the world’s economy? Because they themselves are radicals (bad radicals), and they can never be toppled by weak liberals who’d rather go shopping than protesting.”
― Ranty McRanterson, Freedumb and Dumbocracy: Libertarians, Dogs, Goyim, the Internet, and Last Men

“When it comes to the rich, things are very rarely called by their true names”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“This, I thought, was perhaps the ultimate symbol of the decadently rich, huge amounts of space devoted to nothing in particular.”
― Ashley Weaver, A Peculiar Combination

“Today in my view the most serious problem we face as a nation is the grotesque and growing level of wealth and income inequality. This is a profound moral issue, it is an economic issue, and it is a political issue.”
― Bernie Sanders