“Eventually we all get tired of any and everything!”
“The thought system which dominates our culture is laced with selfish values, and relinquishing those values is a lot easier said than done. The journey to a pure heart can be highly disorienting. For years, we may have worked for power, money or prestige. Now all of a sudden we ve learned that these are just the values of a dying world.”
“Mandy, I hardly think this was appropriate, not after… you know… after the funeral we haven’t had the money for any of your weird little games and I was hoping you’d be more mature now that Jud’s gone,” her father had disappointedly added. “How much’d that cake cost you?” “It’s paid for,” Mandy had argued, but her voice had sounded tiny in the harbour wind. “I used the cash from my summer job at Frenchy’s last year and I… it was my birthday, dad!” “You can’t even be normal about this one thing, can you?” her father had complained. Mandy hadn’t cried, she’d only stared back knowingly, her voice shaky. “…I’m normal.”
“If money is spent in the wrong way, then ‘control’ the spending and if the money is spent in the right way, then ‘decontrol’ the spending.”
“We are only stewards of the world’s resources. They are not ours; they are God’s. When we find our security in Him, we can then give generously from what He has entrusted to us. This is our Christian duty.”
“There are things which money cannot buy; which no music can bring; which no social position can claim; which no personal influence can assure; and which no eloquence can command.”
“He said he had evidence that the Company was giving the opposition party money, which was just preposterous considering what bad form it would have been, trusting anybody in the Third World with money.”
“Materialism and self-centeredness are the great vices of our age.”
“When starting out, don’t worry about not having enough money. Limited funds are a blessing, not a curse. Nothing encourages creative thinking in quite the same way.”
“Money is the most powerful and popular god because everybody is praying for money.”
“Having money will make you look enticing to women even if you are not a good-looking dude. Don’t believe me, go ask Mick Jagger, Donald Trump, Jay-Z and the rest of the fugly men who have all the money and get all the fine women.”
“God does not need our money. He owns everything, including “our” money. What He wants [us] to discover is where our central focus of worship lies. Is that focus on God or our money?”
“Not only is happiness not money, it is not even like money.”
“Everything seemed so clear to him now that he could not stop wondering how it was that everybody did not see it, and that he himself had for such a long while not seen what was so clearly evident. The people were dying out, and had got used to the dying-out process, and had formed habits of life adapted to this process...And so gradually had the people come to this condition that they did not realize the full horrors of it, and did not complain. Therefore, we consider their condition natural and as it should be. Now it seemed as clear as daylight that the chief cause of the people s great want was one that they themselves knew and always pointed out, i.e., that the land which alone could feed them had been taken from them by the landlords. And how evident it was that the children and the aged died because they had no milk, and they had no milk because there was no pasture land, and no land to grow corn or make hay on...The land so much needed by men was tilled by these people, who were on the verge of starvation, so that the corn might be sold abroad and the owners of the land might buy themselves hats and canes, and carriages and bronzes, etc.”
“The real purpose of the opposition is to minimize the amount of money the ruling party will have stolen from the people at the end of its term.”
“The middle class were invented to give the poor hope; the poor, to make the rich feel special; the rich, to humble the middle class.”
“Philosopher Jean Baudrillard made a similar observation about the use of material goods as symbols of immaterial values. He noted that any given material object has two kinds of value: it has use value (the amount of utility which can be derived from the good), and it has sign value (a value based on what the object means to the person who owns it.) Advertisers constantly attempt to increase the amount that people will pay for products by infusing them with artificial sign value. Emotional branding, for example, is the practice of using images to link a product with a positive emotional state, so that people will unthinkingly purchase the product when they crave the emotion.”