George Saunders Quotes

Economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.

Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.

I am not biased against the rich because they are rich, but the most lively people are those without money who would like to have some

The only people who really worry about money are the very poor and the very rich.

The rich are different from us.

The poor have the same basic pleasures as the rich, and the rich will always resent it.

Poor people who had escaped from poverty as I had, feared it, hated it and fled from it all their lives. Those born rich could afford to be touched by it.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

My family got all over me because they said Bush is only for the rich people. Then I reminded them, 'Hey, I'm rich'.

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

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

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

The higher classes constitute the mind of the single large whole of humanity; the lower classes constitute its limbs;

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.

Poor people know poor people, and rich people know rich people. It is one of the few things La Rochefoucauld did not say, but then La Rochefoucauld never lived in the Bronx.

It says anybody can make it, because we're all on a level playing field. But we're not on a level playing field. That 's precisely the point, and that's what the rich don't want to look at. They don't want to recognize that they're not producing wealth at all. They're hoarding wealth. That's different.

Most rich people are the poorest people I know.

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

The rich are more envied by those who have a little, than by those who have nothing.

There are rich people, and there are those who have money. They are not the same people.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.