Paul Merton Quotes

When the idle poor become the idle rich, you'll never know just who is who, or which is which.

I never met a poor person who wanted to soak the rich; they want to get rich.

The fact is that, except for those very few whose wealth is overwhelmingly or entirely inherited, the more affluent have usually worked harder than the less affluent.

I find it hard to be labelled in this new 'super-rich' category because we all grew up with very little. The idea that 'to get rich is glorious' is really a new phenomenon. I certainly didn't grow up like that.

Let some people get rich first.

I don't know how you can move out of one's socioeconomic category if you don't have education.

But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.

As someone who came to New York in the 1970s, I was, like so many of my friends, a certified member of what we now call the 99 percent - and I was a lot closer to the bottom than to the top of that 99 percent. At some point during the intervening years, I moved into the 1 percent.

The Republicans are, 'the party of the rich,' my mom said, 'We're poor, so we're Democrats.' That convinced me. I had no wish to remain poor, so I became a Republican at the age of 12.

The affluent society makes no meaningful distinction between luxury and necessity.

There are but two families in the world … The haves and the have-nots.

I am a capitalist—a rich businessman and most of you are not.

Like Venice’s oligarchs, America’s super-rich are destroying the social mobility that creates wealth.

The best way to earn a fortune in America is to already have one.

People assume that I'm an aristocrat, but I don't really feel part of any class.

It's not in our nature. Americans have never been a people that drive through a nice neighborhood and say, 'Oh, I hate the people who live in these nice houses.'

I'm not going to do class warfare; I want to be wealthy.

Them that's got shall get, Them that's not shall lose. So the Bible says, And it still is news. Mama may have, Papa may have, But God bless the child that's got his own.

I think there's a certain sense of grounding that comes from not being a rich kid from a media-elite school.

Choice dependent on wealth; those are the Tory words.

The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.

The rich are different from you and me because they have more credit.

The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

Outside of the family, education is the greatest determinant of social mobility.

In all the world, rich people are very unpopular.