Wealth Contrast Quotes

My roots were pretty far removed from high income. It's interesting to be back there at the level of income I have now, at this stage in my life.

Everything must be in contrast at an affair like this. You know, to show anything off properly you must have the contrast. Now, I am here tonight representing poverty. We have enough wealth right here at this table, right here at the speaker's table alone---their conscience should hurt them, which I doubt if it does---so that we could liquidate our national debt. Every rich man reaches a time in his career when he comes to a turning point and starts to give it away.

People who live in North Korea, they die for food, but living in the free world, the cat even eats expensive sushi.

Wealth brings a heavy purse; poverty, a light spirit.

Where I lived, it was a cold mining place, a village called Dunston. The only time you saw a Rolls-Royce was when somebody died.

Hence money may be dirt, although dirt is not money.

Dignity and plenty instead of humility and poverty.

Moving from Dubai to the Congo was one of the best things that happened to me, it's a shock to be confronted by the contrast in wealth and culture, and it's hard, but I loved it and it influenced me a lot.

I have learned that I, we, are a dollar-a-day people (which is terrible, they say, because a cow in Japan is worth $9 a day). This means that a Japanese cow would be a middle class Kenyan... a $9-a-day cow from Japan could very well head a humanitarian NGO in Kenya. Massages are very cheap in Nairobi, so the cow would be comfortable.

Playboy in Brazil is like a rich boy, but I've never been a rich boy. My family is not rich. Actually, I help all my family.

The Artist," an ancient sage had once said, "is always sitting on the doorsteps of the rich.

I imagined loading the God of the Sea into a taxi and taking him to the Upper East Side.

The poorest people are so incredibly poor, and the rich are so incredibly rich on the other side. That is a kind of fascination.

That made me feel good, not to go to a resort where outside the door is extreme poverty.

It's quite confusing being one of the less wealthy people at a posh place.

I did not have a car in high school and neither did Angelina. Try to imagine. You go to Beverly Hills High, one of the wealthiest high schools in the nation. Even the cheapest car that anyone has is brand new. All my friends are well off. I have a movie-star father and no car. It was debilitating.

Bathe in your riches and friends, I'll stay here with my songbooks and pens

The distance between the limousine and the gutter is a short one.

When I first began visiting West Germany in the early 1980s, I was startled by the contrast between Birmingham, where I went to school, and affluent Cologne. My host family, the lovely Schumachers, always had an opulent array of grapes on the table; they were better dressed than anyone I knew in Britain.

I didn't grow up rich. I like it here on TV. With finery.

People need such a small amount of money to deal with their own daily life. Because wherever I went to school they taught me about millions of dollars. I dealt with billions of dollars in national plans and investment plans and so on. Not this tiny money, $27 for 42 people.

I've always felt like a lot of people's misconceptions of me have to do with how I grew up. I grew up poor, and I grew up rich.

Johannesburg is weird, because half of it is like Los Angeles. It feels like just wealthy parts of L.A. But half of it is severe slummy, something like Rio De Janiero or something. So it's kind of weird, because it's both happening at the same time.

Everlasting life is a jewel of too great a value to be purchased by the wealth of this world.

The haggardness of poverty is everywhere seen contrasted with the sleekness of wealth, the exhorted labour of some compensating for the idleness of others, wretched hovels by the side of stately colonnades, the rags of indigence blended with the ensigns of opulence; in a word, the most useless profusion in the midst of the most urgent wants.