Wanda Sykes Quotes

I happen to be fortunate: I live in San Francisco, and I can afford a $600 phone. Or two of them!

As homeowners see the value of their homes decline, they become more likely to delay purchases of the big items - like automobiles, electronics and home appliances - that are ballasts of the American economy. When those purchases decline, large manufacturing firms, suddenly short on funds, could begin laying off employees.

The Adversity Index was created by msnbc.com and Moody's Analytics to track the economic fortunes of states and metro areas. Each month, the Adversity Index uses government data on employment, industrial production, housing starts and home prices to label each area as expanding, at risk of recession, in recession or recovering.

With rising incomes, the share of expenditures for food products declines. The resulting shift in expenditures affects demand patterns and employment structures.

Contemplation is a luxury of the middle class, the very rich.

Luxury will be always around, no matter what happens in the world.

When I first starting making money, when I first made my first six-digits, I was - my big thing was I went to put super unleaded in my truck for the first time.

As we get rich, the basics of life - food, clothing and shelter - become a very small part of total expenditure. And people have enough money to purchase things that enhance them spiritually, and I mean the word 'spiritual' not necessarily in a religious sense but in the sense that it adds to your feeling of well-being.

There's nothing - I've bought everything I want. I don't like yachts or anything; you know, I'm not a yacht person, and I've got pretty much the nicest plane I'd want to have.

Americans have spent their way to happiness.

The rich make life more interesting: they are a luxury a civilized society should be able to afford.

I don't remember going to school with anyone who had a Mercedes dealership.

I look at the money I'm about to spend on myself and ask if IKEA's customers could afford it.

When the housing market fell in Las Vegas, we got so many Rolex and Tag Heuer watches it was ridiculous.

I bought quite a few houses and cars.

I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don't desire.

A high proportion of the population enjoys many of the 'luxuries' which until recently were considered the prerogative of the rich; and the ordinary worker lives at what even two decades ago would have been considered in Britain a middle-class standard of life.

An underpaid man is a customer reduced in purchasing power. He cannot buy. Business depression is caused by weakened purchasing power. Purchasing power is weakened by uncertainty or insufficiency of income. The cure of business depression is through purchasing power, and the source of purchasing power is wages.

For average working folks, America was becoming a puzzle. Who was buying all these two-hundred-dollar copper saucepans, anyway? And how was everyone paying for these BMWs? Were people shrewd or just stupefyingly irresponsible?

When we have the means to pay for what we desire, what we get is not so much what is best, as what is costliest.

[P]ride is something only folk with money can afford.

When I had money, money, O! I knew no joy till I went poor; For many a false man as a friend Came knocking all day at my door.

Not sayin' I'm the richest man alive, but I'm in the game.

We must understand what our idea of wealth is. Is it just about more buildings, more machines, more cars, more of everything? More and more is death. In the most affluent societies in the world, for example in the United States of America, a significant percentage of the population is on anti-depressants on a regular basis. If you just withdraw one particular medication from the market, almost half the nation will go crazy. That is not wellbeing. Generally, an American citizen has everything that anyone would dream of.

Poverty hath slain a thousand, but riches have slain ten thousand. They are very uncertain, they promise that which they cannot perform, neither can they afford a contented mind.