Alfred Kazin Quotes

I believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat. I would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.

I'm not interested in making money, or being wealthy enough to have a villa in Beverly Hills, because in Paris I don't need that much money.

What's really baffling to me is the way that the technology has risen up to help us become more materialistic.

[T]he recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.

Some men make fortunes, but not to enjoy them for, blinded by avarice, they live to make fortunes.

We have turned away from the natural world. Instead, it's all about money and power.

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.

Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.

As men advance in life, all passions resolve themselves into money. Love, ambition, even poetry, end in this.

In a culture where the possibility of wealth and the acquisition of things is so defining of success, we end up pursuing things that, even if we are successful, can never deliver what we envisioned they would. The reason riches become such a snare is because we end up evaluating life in mercenary terms and being seen by others in such terms, and life is just not so.

Many people think that happiness comes from having more power or more money.

Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.

I feel like it's okay for us to grow up because a lot of us want to get rich and die young.

People aren't happy unless they buy stuff, and that's because we have become this industrialized nation.

Things, things, things. Always more things, and success is seen as the abundance of things.

I suppose in a way most of my characters are non-consumers, not terribly interested in all the little baubles and artifacts of contemporary life.

A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.

Wall Street was sort of at the height of the fame, everyone thought it was really cool, and I think taking that job, doing something probably more for the money was probably the worst thing I think I've ever done.

I've lived a lot in communist countries and they're intensely interested in money. I think they are more interested in money than capitalists are. They're the most materialistic people in the world. What they're actually living for is material things. The irony of that is that in communist countries there isn't anything to buy.

The newer people of this modern age are more eager to amass than to realize.

The accumulation of wealth is followed by an increase of care, and by an appetite for more.

Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need.

money-making is like a god possessing a priest. He never will leave you, until he has occupied you, wholly changed the order of your being, and seared you through and up and down. Then only would he eventually leave you, but nothing of you except an exhausted wreck, lying prone and wondering who are you.

All else-valor, a good name, glory, everything in heaven and earth-is secondary to the charm of riches.