Richard Flanagan Quotes
When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.
Flanagan, Richard. Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish. Grove Press, 2002.
There were few if any consumer protection laws in those days and many wealthy aristocrats made their money by taking advantage of the poor. They were the landowners, bankers, financiers and often the industrialists. Shaw was a sarcastic social critic and this is a typical line he gave his upper class characters. Today, we have more controls on business and finance, and many wealthy business people have gotten that way by providing great value to the consumers and being honest. However, we still have large numbers of wealthy members of society who do make their money from the poor and middle class by unethical and often illegal means. In the aftermath of the Meltdown of 2008. hundreds of thousands of the homes of the working poor and middle class were foreclosed by the major banks forging the legal documentation for the foreclusures. Millions of consumer contracts are issued that even a PhD cannot understand the terms of without special legal and financial training. There is even a legal definition of a salesperson lying to make a sale which is so commonplace that our law excuses it and calls it "puffing". However, there has been over time, improvement over Shaw's era.
Richard Miller Flanagan (born 1961) is an Australian writer, "considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation", according to The Economist. Each of his novels has attracted major praise and received numerous awards and honours. He also has written and directed feature films. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
