Josh Billings Quotes
About the only difference between the poor and the rich, is this, the poor suffer misery, while the rich have to enjoy it.
Billings, Josh. The Complete Works of Josh Billings. G. W. Carleton & Co., 1876.
The Supreme Court had ruled that there could be no limits placed on the amount of money that could be spent by a rich company or person to campaign for a candidate. It would deny them their right to freedom of speech. That was the context of Hollings’ remark.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston
Abrams originated this famous phrase which many have been used subsequently for various “socialized” government benefits that were available to the rich but not the poor. He was referring to the fact that at the time, the government provided housing assistance to the rich by having federally insured mortgages and granting tax deductions for the interest in home mortgages, but there was no assistance to the poor who could only afford to rent and had no tax deductions nor was there any federal public housing assistance. During the Great Recession the phrase was often used when the government gave bail out money to General Motors and the largest banks who were close to bankruptcy, but the landscaping gardener or the hot dog vendor whose business was falling because of the recession were told that is the capitalist system—there are some winners and some losers. The government officials who advocated the bailout did not disagree about the fairness and appropriateness of the Abrams phrase but if they had not bailed the banks out, the entire economic system of the country would probably have collapsed and the ensuing depression would hurt the average worker and the poor even more. Related to the recent “too big to fail” concept.
Josh Billings was the pen name of 19th-century American humorist Henry Wheeler Shaw . He was a famous humor writer and lecturer in the United States during the latter half of the 19th century. He is often compared to Mark Twain.
