Material Well-Being Quotes

If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be that private ownership of the means of production is a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being.... Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art and literature.

Wages, which cannot be considered as a mere commodity must enable the worker and his family to have access to a truly human standard of living in the material, social, cultural and spiritual orders.

If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be the private ownership of the means of production as a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being. All civilizations have up to now been based on private property. Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art, and literature. There is no experience to show that any other social system could provide mankind with any of the achievements of civilization.

Economic progress and justice do not consist in superbly equalized destitution, but in the constant creation of more and more goods and services, of more and more wealth and income to be shared.

We want the same standard of life Canadians enjoy and take for granted.

I preach that anybody can improve their lives. I think God wants us to be prosperous. I think he wants us to be happy. To me, you need to have money to pay your bills. I think God wants us to send our kids to college. I think he wants us to be a blessing to other people. But I don't think I'd say God wants us to be rich. It's all relative, isn't it?

The poorer is a family, the greater is the proportion of the total outgo which must be used for food... The proportion of the outgo used for food, other things being equal, is the best measure of the material standard of living of a population.

Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.

While no amount of financial wealth can guarantee an experience of prosperity, it is possible to experience prosperity at almost any level of income, except when we are unable to meet our basic physical needs.

Business underlies everything in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness the fact that in the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.

Just spreading the money around - that isn't what makes people better off; it's having more and better goods and services.

It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.

A high proportion of the population enjoys many of the 'luxuries' which until recently were considered the prerogative of the rich; and the ordinary worker lives at what even two decades ago would have been considered in Britain a middle-class standard of life.

Many of the products which create a modern standard of living are only the physical incorporations of ideas- not only the ideas of an Edison or a Ford but the ideas of innumerable anonymous people who figure out the design of supermarkets, the location of gasoline stations, and the million mundane things on which our material well-being depends. Societies which have more people carrying out physical acts and fewer people supplying ideas do not have higher standards of living. Quite the contrary.

Being somebody is better than not being somebody vis à vis what you want out of life. If you want to talk to interesting people and have them talk to you, and if you want enough money to live someplace pleasant and to go on trips and be able to help people you love, you simply have to be somebody.

The sum of the whole matter is this - our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.

There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way.

No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. ... To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being.

With capitalism and prosperity came something new: the idea of progress. This is the notion that things are getting better and will continue to get better in the future.

A higher standard of living also brings about a higher standard of culture and civilization.

Prosperity's the very bond of love.

What right have you to take the word wealth, which originally meant well-being, and degrade and narrow it by confining it to certain sorts of material objects measured by money.

A science or an art may be said to be "useful" if its development increases, even indirectly, the material well-being and comfort of men, it promotes happiness, using that word in a crude and commonplace way.

Man should be able to eat and live without having every hour of his existence absorbed by material labor, so that he may be able to cultivate the superior faculties of his nature; but I listen with dread to those who tell you that enjoyment is your right, and material well-being your aim, because I know that such teachings can only produce egoists, and that these doctrines have been in France, and threaten to be in Italy, the destruction of every noble idea, of every sacrifice, and of every pledge of future greatness.

East Asia confirms the superior capacity of industrial capitalism in raising the material standard of living of large masses of people.