Louis Auchincloss Quotes

the possession of wealth, and especially the inheritance of wealth, seems almost invariably to sterilize genius.

For lots of people who became rich, they believe they earned their fortune through hard work. They don't think about society and only want to leave their fortune to their children.

We see that the richest property owners ... are precisely those who work the least or who do not work at all.

Only 18 percent of the income of America’s richest families come from work—hard or otherwise. In America, most wealth does not come from hard work, It comes from wealth.

I don’t really think that as a society we want to confer blessings on generations after generations who contribute nothing to society simply because somebody in the far distant past happened to amass a great sum of wealth.

7 percent of inheritors get two-thirds of all the wealth transfers..

If you're extremely rich, and you have got children, my theory was, you give them enough so they can do anything, but not enough so they can do nothing.

I regard large inherited wealth as a misfortune, which merely serves to dull men's faculties. A man who possesses great wealth should, therefore, allow only a small portion to descend to his relatives. Even if he has children, I consider it a mistake to hand over to them considerable sums of money beyond what is necessary for their education. To do so merely encourages laziness and impedes the healthy development of the individual's capacity to make an independent position for himself.

If you must have motivation, think of your paycheck on Friday.

This is the first generation to grow up on Thatcher - it's a different ethos. It's money minded, and it's the cult of yourself. Now that's fine, except when it falls down, and you can't achieve your goals - through high unemployment, through the fact that you probably need inherited money to get anywhere.

And those are the Rich, who transmit what they have to their Posterity; whereby particular Families become rich; and of such are compounded Cities, Countries, Nations, etc.

I hear all this, you know, 'Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.' No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own - nobody.

It is hard to redistribute wealth of there is no productive class producing it.

Economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege

There are a lot of Americans who do not realize that their financial comfort is a consequence of conditions and programs in this country that made it possible for them to be wealthy.

I want to see wealth cascading down the generations.

If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare.

Maybe it’s that silver spoon in his [Mitt Romney’s] mouth that keeps him from seeing why the middle class doesn’t pull itself up by its bootstraps, like he did when Daddy loaned him his first million dollars.

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.

You have to believe that those privileged from birth achieve success all on their own..

The money that bin Laden inherited was about 20 million dollars over the course of many years, not the much larger sums some have suggested. In 1994, his family cut him off.

I came from a family of extremely old money, and so by the time I was born, there was really just a trickle of money left.

We removed wealth tax in the 1991 budget. That is one way in which the children of those who had wealth could put money honestly into their enterprises.

Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth.

I'm not the kind of guy who wants to basically collect money and do nothing.