Philipp Meyer Quotes

The main threads running through the lives of W. A. Clark and his daughter Huguette include the costs of ambition, the burdens of inherited wealth, the fragility of reputation, the folly of judging someone's life from the outside, and the tension between engaging with the world, with all its risks, and keeping a safe distance from danger.

The man who dies rich, dies in disgrace.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

Only the elites despise earning money.

The landed men are the true owners of our political vessel, the moneyed men are no more than passengers in it.

Among civilized peoples, especially the very wealthy population of the United States of America, women have become objects of luxury who consume but do not produce.

A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have something equivalent in an additional decade.

However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel everyone else in the accumulation of goods.

Sometimes I think that the public's lack of criticism of the rich - and how they seek their pleasure - might derive from the fact that Americans still believe they will one day be joining their number.

I think our election proved to us that 'billionaire' is an incredibly magical word in our language in that people just defer to it. Donald Trump is not a billionaire, but he knew it was vital for him to be perceived as one.

Only if you were lucky to be born in the right class, the one Donald Trump was born in, then of course you have a beautiful view of the world. You find that everybody else is an imbecile, because he doesn't think like you, he doesn't dress like you, he doesn't have the same girl as you, etc. But I call that ignorance.

There's always been a nasty strain of class prejudice ingrained in the condemnation of football's 'undeserving rich,' as if the working class is uniquely susceptible to being corrupted by money, and as if they deserve their wealth less than those born to it.

To Harmodius, descended from the ancient Harmodius, when he reviled Iphicrates [a shoemaker's son] for his mean birth, "My nobility," said he, "begins in me, but yours ends in you.

The Stately Homes of England, How beautiful they stand, To prove the Upper Classes, Have still the Upper Hand.

This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don’t sell anything to anybody.

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

When the man is at home, his standing in society is well known and quietly taken; but when he is abroad, it is problematical, and is dependent on the success of his manners.

The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.

A ready means of being cherished by the English is to adopt the simple expedient of living a long time. I have little doubt that if, say, Oscar Wilde had lived into his nineties, instead of dying in his forties, he would have been considered a benign, distinguished figure suitable to preside at a school prize-giving or to instruct and exhort scout masters at their jamborees. He might even have been knighted.

Long ago life was clean, sex was bad and obscene, and the rich were so mean. Stately homes for the Lords, croquet lawns, village greens, Victoria was my queen.

We have a new class in this country: the deserving rich. ... The deserving rich do nice things for each other. Comforting the unafflicted is something that comes naturally to them.

You know who's also joining the Wall Street protesters? Kanye West. That's a real good idea -- a guy with diamonds in his teeth protesting greed.

We endeavor more that men should speak of us, than how and what they speak, and it sufficeth us that our name run in men's mouths, in what manner soever. It stemma that to be known is in some sort to have life and continuance in other men's keeping.

The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.