Money Makes the World Go Round


Idealists have long sought to eliminate it, but the exchange of goods and services for other goods and services (the generic form of money) remains with us. The fact of the matter is that most people won't do anything for you unless you pay them something. It is all very well and good to love your job, but most of us would rather be off skiing or lying on a beach somewhere than working. It's money that keeps us doing something constructive.

Historically the advancement of civilization has been based on the desire for two things: power and money. The quest for power has built and destroyed empires. The quest for money built the United States and is responsible for most of the inventions of mankind.

Money differs from power in that it is a liquid thing. It is no use in and of itself. It is only useful in so far as it can be used to buy things and do things. The earlier part of the twentieth century saw a great concentration of money and power in a relatively few individuals, the creators of industrial empires: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Frick, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Gould. The money which these men accumulated was not static. They lived lavishly in Newport or New York City, but their industrial empires brought the Industrial Revolution to America. This industry accounted for the wave of immigrants which passed through Ellis Island on their way to the New World, a land of possibilities and promise. Their philanthropy built universities, libraries, and museums.

Today, liberal thought suggests that the government is more competent at such matters as endowing the arts and sponsoring universities than are private individuals. It suggests that should decide through subsidies which industries should survive and which should not. History suggests otherwise.


First-class passengers in the Zurich airport board first -- not women with babies or people in wheelchairs, but people with money -- as it should be.
Paul Erdman

A private railroad car is not an acquired taste. One takes to it immediately.
Mrs. August Belmont

I don't care how the poor live; my only regret is that they live at all.
George Moore

Hell, Lee [Iacocca] doesn't want to be President, he wants to be appointed Pope.
Keith Crane, Automotive News

If you only talk cars, people say you're a provincial son of a bitch. If you're outspoken, then they say you're running for office.
Lee Iacocca

I don't need a $100 million mistake. Try to make a $5 million mistake if you have to make one.
Lee Iacocca, Chrysler CEO to top managers

There's no secret about success. Did you ever know a successful man that didn't tell you all about it?
Kin Hubbard

The general manager of the Lincoln-Mercury Division said one day in a meeting, "I'm not interested in safety because it isn't popular." He was a mouthpiece and a fathead but it was typical of our manager.
Fred Hooven

It is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.
Cornfield's Law

It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; the real vice is making losses.
Winston Churchill

Whenever man come up with a better mousetrap, nature invariably comes up with a better mouse.
James Carswell

You can only drink thirty or forty glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
Adolphus Busch

Professor Galbraith is horrified by the number of Americans who have bought cars with tail fins on them, and I am horrified by the number of Americans who take seriously the proposals of Mr. Galbraith.
William F. Buckley Jr.

If General Motors ever made the claims for a Buick that Hustler made for a set of genitals, Ralph Nader would lead a mob on Detroit.
R. Emmett Tyrrell

Enthusiasm for conservation can be fashioned into a nasty weapon for those who dislike business on general principles.
William F. Buckley Jr.

Money doesn't always bring happiness. People with ten million dollars are no happier than people with nine million dollars.
Hobart Brown

One says that money doesn't buy happiness. Without a doubt, one was speaking of the money of others.
Sacha Guity

Money may not buy friends, but it certainly gives you a better class of enemies.
Metropolis News

Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a large research staff to solve the problem.
Bill Vaughan

Money doesn't buy happiness. It buys great hookers -- but not happiness.
Burt Reynolds

Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell.
Frank Borman, Eastern Airlines president

All progress is based upon the universal desire of every organism to live beyond its income.
Samuel Butler

Let us all be happy and live within our means even if we have to borrow the money to do it.
Artemus Ward

It's pretty hard to tell what brings happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.
Kin Hubbard

The rich who are unhappy are worse off than the poor who are unhappy; for the poor at least cling to the hope that more money would solve their problems, but the rich know better.
Sydney Harris

It's what your right arm's for.
Courage Beer ad

In advertising there is a saying that if you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs -- then you just don't understand the problem.
Hugh M. Beville Jr.

If advertising encourages people to live beyond their means, so does matrimony.
Bruce Barton

Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission.
Fred Allen

Advertising came into the world when men became too impatient to wait for Mrs. Jones to tell Mrs. Smith that Brown's pickles were good.
Roy Durstine

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising.
Zelda Fitzgerald

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
Sinclair Lewis

You can fool all of the people all of the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.
Joseph E. Levine

Advertising may be described as the art of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
Stephen Leacock

Great marketing cannot sell a pedestrian product very well.
John Scully, President of Apple Computer

Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.
Steuart Henderson Britt

The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.
Tom Waitts, on advertising

Beware of imitations.
Ad for Virginia "falsies" manufacturer

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don't know which half.
John Wanamaker

Man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel about the world on silent motor bikes, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?
David Ogilvy

If you want to be equal with me, you can get your own Rolls-Royce, your own house and your own million dollars.
Muhammad Ali

To force myself to earn more money, I determined to spend more.
James Agate

Bankruptcy is a legal proceeding in which you put your money in your pants pocket and give your coat to your creditors.
Joey Adams

If governments refused to pay, how could we collect without an army?
George Champion, former Chase Manhattan chairman, explaining his opposition to bank loans to foreign countries

If you owe a bank enough money you own it.
Anon

One rule which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it, Never lend any money unless they don't need it.
Ogden Nash

Bankers are just like everybody else, except richer.
Ogden Nash

When business accepts help from the government, it can be like going to bed with a hippopotamus. It's nice and warm for the moment, but then your bedmate rolls over and crushes you.
Donald Rumsfield

Will you please tell me what to do with all the Vice Presidents a bank has? Why, the United States is the biggest institution in the world and they have only one Vice President and nobody has ever found anything for him to do.
Will Rogers

You cannot create employees without first creating employers.
Jack Kemp, speaking of free enterprise zones

Henry Ford made a lot of money making cars at one time, but that was a small advantage to him compared to the benefit to millions of people who for the first time in their lives were emancipated from common public carriers and could live where they wanted, move at the hours they wanted, to the places they wanted. Ford collected a billion bucks, but that was peanuts compared to the benefits.
George Stigler, University of Chicago economist

That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.
Abraham Lincoln

A capitalist is a catalyst. Money is a useless thing. You can't eat the stuff. It's what it makes. It's the sinew of the whole system.
Malcolm S. Forbes

Keeping accounts is of no use when a man is spending his own money. You won't eat less beef today because you have written down what it cost yesterday.
Samuel Johnson

A businessman needs three umbrellas -- one to leave at the office, one to leave at home and one to leave on the train.
Paul Dickson

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
Peter Drucker

If you think all government companies are alike, look at Venezuela. Politicians run one [company], businessmen another. Now guess who makes the cash. And guess who blows it.
Forbes

It seems that it is only in the United States that an almost masochistic attack on the position of its own oil companies exists.
John J. McCloy

If things can go wrong, they will -- and when they do, blame it on the oil industry.
API Corollary to Murphy's Law

Since the federal govenment states that the five-cent gasoline tax would provide 320,000 jobs, then a 10-cent tax would provide 640,000 jobs and a 50-cent tax would provide 3.2 million jobs. We could solve the entire unemployment problem with a $1-a-gallon tax, thus employing 6.4 million. A $2-a-gallon tax would give jobs to the unemployed in India, Africa, China, and the jobless of the world. This certainly would prove that the capitalist system is the best system devised by the mind of man. Who needs factories, farms or a merchant marine? When all you need is a tax on gasoline and all the problems of the entire world are solved.
Stuart Oliver, letter in the Oakland Tribune

Well we didn't get rich in 1983, either, so cancel our order for champagne. We'll take peanut butter instead. We'd like to be sparkle-eyed and don't-give-a-damn about the situation, but the fact is we aren't all that fond of peanut butter. We'd rather be rich.
Robert O. Frederick, Year-end editorial in Drilling

The price of an article is exactly what it will fetch.
Sir Marcus Samuel, founder of Shell Oil

Money is the wise man's religion.
Euripides

Work is the best method devised for killing time.
William Feather

Here is my best advice on the matter of deductibles: just count off on your fingers all the items that you suspect might be deductible -- and then forget them, because they aren't.
W.C. Fields

Where there is a will, there's prosperity around the corner.
W.C. Fields

Her voice sounded like money.
F.Scott Fitzgerald

"Money isn't everything" according to those who have it.
Malcolm S. Forbes

The line between idiosyncracy and idiocy is money.
Malcolm S. Forbes

Detroit would be better off today if they researched a better engine, rather than people's color preferences.
Malcolm S. Forbes

A man who makes a one-dollar profit on his expense account is dishonest. A man who loses five cents on one is a damned fool.
Gene Fowler

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Anatole France

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.
Robert Frost

The reason worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.
Robert Frost

It is better to give than to lend, and it costs about the same.
Sir Philip Gibbs

Success is simple. Do what's right, the right way, at the right time.
Arnold Glasgow

If that's all he can get, and he takes it, I should say it's enough.
J.P. Morgan, in response to the question "Do you consider $10 a week enough for a longshoreman with a family to support?"

With GM paying $10 an hour, these people who come out of the cotton patch making less than $3.10 an hour wouldn't complain if they had to roll a peanut across the road with their nose.
Alex Ott, UAW international representative trying to force unionization on a GM plant in Decatur, Ala.

I can hire one-half of the working class and kill the other half.
Jay Gould

Money is the poor people's credit card.
Marshall McLuhan

What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.
Kin Hubbard

There are plenty of good five cent cigars in the country. The trouble is that they cost a quarter. What the country really needs is a good five cent nickel.
Thomas Marshall, Vice-President

Even the law of gravitation would be brought into dispute were there a pecuniary interest involved.
Thomas Macaulay

The rich never feel so good as when they speak of their possessions as responsibilities.
Robert Lynd

People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
Sinclair Lewis

Samuel Gompers has spent his life trying to keep labor from working too hard and has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Will Rogers

A study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything is last year.
Marty Allen

The instability of the economy is equalled only by the instability of economists.
John H. Williams

If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.
J. Paul Getty

I don't meet competition. I crush it.
Charles Revson

We have yet to find a significant case where the company did not move in the direction of the chief executive's home.
Ken Patton

It would be wrong if the government failed to intervene to stop this great industry from committing suicide.
Henry Duffy, Air Line Pilots Association president, telling Congress that the airlines had cut fares too much

The biggest help government here can provide to business is to stay off its back. Silicon Valley would not have existed with the government determining that we shall have more software, or that we shall have 11 laboratories around the country under politically appointed officials.
Malcolm S. Forbes

Only one fellow in ten thousand understands the currency question, and we meet him every day.
Kin Hubbard

The public be damned. I am working for my stockholders.
William H. Vanderbilt

They call me eccentric. They used to call me nuts. I haven't changed. The only difference between being eccentric and being nuts is the number of security boxes you own.
Alfred McGuire, American basketball coach

One of society's absurd delusions is that the spending of money can cure something.
Vernon Howard

The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

If a man is wise, he gets rich an' if he gets rich, he gets foolish, or his wife does. That's what keeps the money movin' around.
Finley Peter Dunne

Rather than earn money, it was Thoreau's idea to reduce his wants so that he would not need to buy anything. As he went around preaching this ingenious idea, the shopkeepers of Concord hoped he would drop dead.
Richard Armour

We all like to see everybody make a profit... a very little.
Cullen Hightower

He remembered poor Julian [actually F. Scott Fitzgerald] and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."
Ernest Hemmingway

If you really want you people to innovate, buy a science fiction book, tear off the covers, and tell them it's history.
Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari

The reward of energy, enterprise and thrift is taxes.
William Feather

Some people use one-half their ingenuity to get into debt, and the other half to avoid paying it.
George D. Prentice

You have to choose [as a voter] between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government. And, with due respect for those gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.
George Bernard Shaw

The more money you give to people the better; and the less advice.
John Cowper Powys

Charity, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Next to putting it in a bank, men like to squander their superfluous wealth on those to whom it is sure to be doing the least possible good.
William Hazlitt

The best way to help the poor is not to become one of them.
Laing Hancock, Australian millionaire

You are affluent when you buy what you want, do what you wish and don't give a thought to what it costs.
J.P. Morgan

The entire essence of America is the hope to first make money -- then make money with money -- then make lots of money with lots of money.
Paul Erdman

The railroads are not run for the benefit of the dear public. That cry is nonsense. They are built for men who invest their money and expect to get a fair percentage of the same.
William H. Vanderbilt

If you take a traditional bureaucracy and give it computers, then instead of generating 30 useless pieces of paper, you generate 300.
Paul A. Strassman

Automating a mess yields an automated mess.
Michael Hammer

To err is human, to forgive is not company policy.
poster

It's not a cheaper car that people want. It's an expensive car that costs less.
Anon

Many of us spend half our time wishing for things we could have if we didn't spend half our time wishing.
Alexander Woollcott

Nowadays people are divided into three classes -- the Haves, the Have- Nots, and the Have-Not-Paid-For-What-They-Haves.
Earl Wilson

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know it is.
Oscar Wilde

People who cannot find time for recreation are obliged sooner or later to find time for illness.
John Wanamaker

When red-haired people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.
Mark Twain

The poor are the only ones who suffer. And they're used to it.
Gary Trudeau

Executives are people who have their names printed on company letterheads because no one can read their signatures.
Today's Chuckle, Los Angeles Times Syndicate

People are wealthy. It is pastries that are rich.
John Starrs, commenting on the "Forbes 400: The Richest People in America"

The greatest act of patriotism is making a profit.
Dean Spatz

Do not waste you time with Social Questions. What is the matter with the Poor is poverty. What is the matter with the Rich is uselessness.
George Bernard Shaw

The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization.
George Bernard Shaw

I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination.
George Bernard Shaw

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and a little cheaper.
John Ruskin

Don't gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it until the price goes up. If the price doesn't go up, don't buy it.
Will Rogers

Thanks a thousand.
Nelson Rockefeller

Poverty, of course, is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.
William Pitt

All money nowadays seems to be produced today with a natural homing instinct for the treasury.
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

I inherited my ability from both parents; my mother's ability for spending money, and my father's ability for not earning it.
Laurence J. Peter

Anybody who thinks there's safety in numbers hasn't looked at the stock market pages.
Irene Peter

The two most beautiful words in the English language are: check enclosed.
Dorothy Parker

I have an inviolable rule against employing nepots and spouses, because they breed politics. Whenever two people get married, one of them must depart - preferably the female, to look after the baby.
David Ogilvy, founder of the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency

General Motors could buy Delaware if DuPont were willing to sell it.
Ralph Nader


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