Samuel Johnson Quotes
Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.
Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Charles Dilly, 1791.
He was expressing his cynicism about deficit spending leading affluence. However, those who advocate government counter-cyclical spending have never advocated constant deficit spending, but have urged deficit spending for specific periods and when the economy has turned around, stopping the spending and reducing the deficit.
Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. Religiously, he was a devout Anglican, and politically a committed Tory. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Johnson as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is the subject of James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, described by Walter Jackson Bate as "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature".
