N. R. Narayana Murthy Quotes

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'

Our rich people are not an ethnic minority. A poor person in Tennessee or Arkansas can say, "I'm not wealthy, but maybe my son or my daughter can grow up to be Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton." That's absolutely not true in countries like Zimbabwe, or Burma, or Indonesia, or Bolivia, where the majority of the people look around and they say, "Everybody who's rich belongs to a different ethnic group.

one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

Like Venice’s oligarchs, America’s super-rich are destroying the social mobility that creates wealth.

I do not like the rich.

We've never been people that go around and confront people that have been financially successful and say, 'We hate you. We envy you because of how well you're doing.'

Growing up on, say, the Upper East Side, you're so isolated. If you go to the Hamptons every weekend, you never talk to a construction worker, and the construction worker would never talk to you.

In all the world, rich people are very unpopular.

The rich are not a contented tribe. The demands from others to share their wealth become so tiresome, so insistent, they often decide they must insulate themselves. Insulation eventually breeds a mild form of paranoia.

We're running out of rich people in this country.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

Cory Booker became a millionaire because this is how the economy works for people of his class: Rich people give other rich people money to do nothing, simply because they 'deserve' it.

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets ... the rich and the poor.

If you have more rich people and more poor people and fewer people in the middle, what you lose is democracy.

People say law but they mean wealth.

Senators will associate only with men of their own class; and thus become strangers to the condition of the common people.

Water does tend to flow up hill toward money and power.

The rich make life more interesting: they are a luxury a civilized society should be able to afford.

A meritocracy increases inequality --- by its very nature, it has to.

In every country, and under every government, particular men may be too rich.

The financial rewards of economic change have accrued disproportionately to the most talented and well-educated members of society.

Surrounded by the evidence of their success, the wealthy come to believe that they are fundamentally better than other Americans and that working people deserve their declining fortunes. They trumpet meritocracy while ensuring that their children enjoy crushing advantages from birth. They have unprecedented access to politicians and use it to push policies that swell their wealth while defunding institutions, such as public education, that sustain opportunities for less-fortunate Americans.

People begin to resent the rich only when they conclude that the system is rigged.

That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one's kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.