Samuel Johnson Quotes
Wasting a fortune is evaporation by a thousand imperceptible means.
Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Charles Dilly, 1791.
He was a conservative, Republican Congressman from Georgia when he made this statement complaining about the wast of mmoney by Federal Officials and bureaucrats. The thing that made this common complaint memorable is that several years later, he was appointed by President Donald Trump as Secretary of Health and Human Services. In less than a year in the office, he was forced to resign [fired] in disgrace for wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars chartering private airplanes for himself and his staff including one where he spent $25,000 to charter a plane from Washington DC to Philadelphia -- a two hour drive in his government car, less than $100 for the Amtrak train or $10 by the Greayhound bus. The scandal that erupted was made worse by the hypocricy.
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".