Michael Ondaatje Quotes

The media assume that if your life or liberty is on the line and you have a lot of money, you automatically get the best.

I always wanted so much glamour in my life, so I have always been obsessed with class, and from dating a few people who were from old money and a few from new money in my 20s, I just sort of became obsessed with this idea of clueless rich people.

In the building I live in on Park Avenue there are ten people who could buy the Yankees, but none of them could hit the ball out of Yankee Stadium.

They're smart in Orange County. Smart and rich - just how I like 'em.

Look I'm politically correct, I went to a great school, I was a good student, look, I'm a smart guy.

Power leads to more power, no matter what your racket, and not only were they rich and influential but they were smart as hell, too.

What is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

There is no such thing as a really rich victim.

It seems that England's royal family is running out of money. They are down to just $1.6 million. Well sure, that's what happens when nobody in your family has had a job for the last thousand years.

We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.

The rich are always afraid.

You either get free stuff or you get freedom. You cannot have both and you need to make a choice.

Just as war is freedom's cost, disagreement is freedom's privilege.

The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.

A [New Yorker ] is what it has always been. It combines those who pursue the truth with those who pursue the rewards of orthodoxy and those who pursue what is comfortable to the rich.

Among all the emotions, the rich have the least talent for love. It is possible to love one's dog, dress or duck-shooting hat, but a human being presents a more difficult problem. The rich might wish to experience feelings of affection, but it is almost impossible to chip away the enamel of their narcissism. They take up all the space in all the mirrors in the house. Their children, who represent the most present and therefore the most annoying claim on their attention, usually receive the brunt of their irritation.

Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has - I'm not kidding.

If a man who is born to a fortune cannot make himself easier and freer than those who are not, he gains nothing.

There's also the idea in this country [USA], it's not wholly new, but it's new in its kind of purity, in that you have to be really smart to be really rich. I always say to people, the reason people believe this is a) they've never met a really smart person, and b) they've never met a really rich person. I have met both, and I cannot see the crossover. You do not have to be a genius to get rich. You have to be ruthless to get rich.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man.

I think that being part of privilege and never having to work a day in your life is so boring. I'm so glad of what I've achieved. I'm so glad I've achieved it as well.

Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.

You're a white male living in America, brought up in one of the richest cities in the county, Palo Alto. You went to high school with Steve Jobs' daughter, and your journalism teacher is the mother-in-law of Sergey, co-founder of Google.

That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred ans sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thence forward, and forever free.

Wealth may be an excellent thing, for it means power, and it means leisure, it means liberty.