1. Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other piece of paper in any other part of the universe.
Douglas Adams (1952-2001) British author. Life, the Universe and Everything (1986)
2. What troubles me is not that movie start run for office, but that they find it easy to get elected. It should be difficult. It should be difficult for millionaires, too.
Shana Alexander (b.1925) U.S. writer and editor. Life (1966)
3. Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
Woody Allen (b.1935) U.S. actor, humorist, producer and director. “The Early Essays,” Without Feathers (1976)
4. It does seem the more you get the more you spend. It is rather like being on a golden treadmill.
Charles Allsop (b.1940) U.S. commodities broker. Remark (December 1988)
5. The almighty dollar is the only object of worship.
Anonymous. Philadelphia Public Ledger (December 2, 1836)
6. When money speaks, the truth keeps silent.
Anonymous.
7. Getting money is like digging with a needle; spending it is like water soaking into sand.
Anonymous. Japanese proverb.
8. Money has no legs, but it runs.
Anonymous. Japanese proverb.
9. Money alone is the ruling principle of the world.
Anonymous. Latin proverb.
10. With money in your pocket, you are wise and you are handsome and you sing well too.
Anonymous. Yiddish proverb.
11. When money is once parted with, it can never return.
Jane Austen (1775-1817) British novelist. Sense and Sensibility (1811), vol. 1, ch. 2
12. Money, of course, is never just money. It’s always something else, and it’s always something more, and it always has the last word.
Paul Auster (b.1947) U.S. novelist, short-story writer, and poet. Hand to March (1997)
13. Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) English philosopher and statesman. “Of Seditions and Troubles,” Essays (1597-1625)
14. Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex: you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.
James Baldwin (1924-87) U.S. writer. “Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” Esquire (May 1961)
15. Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand
Aphra Behn (1640-89) English novelist and playwright. The Rover (1681), pt. 2, 1
16. How they love money…They adore money! Holy money! Beautiful money!…people were feeble-minded about everything except money.
Saul Bellow (b.1915) U.S. novelist. Seize the Day (1956), ch. 2
17. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which some coveted after, they have erred from the faith and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
Bible, I Timothy, 6:10
18. MONEY, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us expecting when we part with it.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) U.S. journalist and writer. The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)
19. When money talks, few are deaf.
Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933) U.S. novelist and playwright. Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938)
20. Whether he admits it or not, a man has been brought up to look at money as a sign of his virility, a symbol of his power, a bigger phallic symbol than a Porsche.
Victoria Billings (b.1945) U.S. journalist and author. The Womansbook (1974)
21. We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
Anthony Burgess (1917-93) British novelist, critic and composer. Interview, The Face (December 1984)
22. It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.
George W. Bush (b.1946) U.S. president. Quoted in Reuters (May 5, 2000)
23. It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902) British writer. Erewhom (1872), ch. 20
24. Money can only be the useful drudge of things immeasurably higher than itself. Exalted beyond this, as it sometimes is, it remains Caliban still and still plays the beast.
Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) U.S. industrialist and philanthropist. Adress, at the presentation of the Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh, Pennylvania (November 5, 1985)
25. Dollar making is not necessarily business.
Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) U.S. industrialist and philanthropist. 1920. Attrib.
26. That realm cannot be rich whose coin is poor or base.
William Cecil (1520-98) English statesman. Said at the time of the reform of the English coinage. Attrib.
27. Fireworks are the best fun you can have spending money.
Terence Conran (b.1931) British business executive, retailer and founder of Habitat. Evening Standard (London) (July 5, 1989)
28. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen ninety six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
Charles Dickens (1812-70) British novelist. There were twenty shillings in a pound and twelve pence in a shilling. David Copperfield (1849-50), ch. 12
29. Money and goods are certainly the best of references.
Charles Dickens (1812-70) British novelist. Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), bk. 1, ch. 4
30. Finance is an art. And it represents the operations of the subtlest of the intellectuals and of the egoists.
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) U.S. novelist and journalist. The Financier (1912)
31. Business? It’s quite simple. It’s other people’s money.
Alexandre Dumas (1824-95) French playwright and novelist. La Question d’argent (1857), Act 11, Scene 7
32. Money doesn’t talk, it sears.
Bob Dylan (b.1941) U.S. singer. Song lyric. “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding” (1965)
33. Money, which represents the prose of life and which hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is I its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) U.S. essayist, lecturer and poet. “Nominalist and Realist,” Essays: Second Series (1844)
34. If money is your hope for independence, you will never have it.
Henry Ford (1863-1947) U.S. industrialist, automobile manufacturer, and founder of Ford Motor Company. My Life and Work (co-written with Samuel Crowther; 1922)
35. There are only two fools in this world. One is the millionaire who thinks that by hoarding money he can somehow accumulate real power, and the other is the penniless reformer who thinks that if only he can take the money away from one class and give it to another, all the world’s ills will be cured.
Henry Ford (1863-1947) U.S. industrialist, automobile manufacturer, and founder of Ford Motor Company. My Life and Work (co-written with Samuel Crowther; 1922)
36. Money is like an arm or a leg, use it or lose it.
Henry Ford (1863-1947) U.S. industrialist, automobile manufacturer, and founder of Ford Motor Company. Interview (November 1931)
37. Remember that time is money.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) U.S. politician, inventor and journalist. Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748)
38. If you’d know the value of money, go and borrow some.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) U.S. politician, inventor and journalist. The Poor Richard’s Almanack series (1732-58) was originally published under the pseudonym Richard Saunders. Poor Richard’s Almanack (1754)
39. She had a powerful regard for money-I suppose because we never had any.
Brian Friel (b.1929) Irish writer. The Diviner (1982)
40. He that payeth beforehand shall have his work ill done.
Thomas Fuller (1654-1734) English physician and writer. Gnomologia (1732)
41. I’ve always had a place for every dollar that came in. I’ve never seen the day where I could say that I felt rich. Generally you have to worry about paying the bills.
- Paul Getty (1892-1976) U.S. entrepreneur, oil industry executive and financier. Interview, Evening Standard (London) (February 11, 1974)
42. My hardest job has been to keep from being a millionaire.
Amadeo Giannini (1870-1949) U.S. banker and founder of Bank of America. American magazine (January 1931)
43. Money itch is a bad thing. I never had that trouble.
Amadeo Giannini (1870-1949) U.S. banker and founder of Bank of America. Quoted in “America’s Banker,” Time 100: Heroes and Inspirations (December 1999)
44. Once one has got the money habit, it is extremely difficult to kick it.
Godfrey Golzen (1930-2001) British business writer. “The Money Junkies,” Smart Moves (co-written with Andrew Gardner; 1990)
45. And what we men of business should remember is that art, philosophy and religion can and should…be made to pay. And it’s pay or perish in this world.
Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946) British actor, manager and playwright. The Madras House (1910)
46. These companies have money thrown at them. And that’s good, but it’s also dangerous. It’s good because it allows them to do big things, and it is dangerous because companies who have too much money don’t have the market discipline of learning to operate with the money that they bring in as part of their business…and developing a pattern or focusing that the discipline brings.
Andrew S. Grove (b.1936) U.S. entrepreneur, author and chairman of Intel Corporation. Referring to the rush to invest in dot.com companies during the late 1990s. Speech, Los Angeles Times 3rd Annual Investment Strategies Conference, Los Angeles, California (May 22, 1999)
47. Accountants are the witch-doctors of the modern world and willing to turn their hands to any kind of magic.
Charles Eustace Harman (1894-1970) British judge. Speech (February 1964)
48. Money is certainly too dangerous an instrument to leave to the fortuitous expediency of politicians.
Friedrich August Von Hayek (1899-1992) British economist. Choice in Currency (1976)
49. If possibly honestly, if not, somehow, make money.
Horace (65-8 B.C.) Roman poet and satirist. Epistles (20? B.C.) bk. 1, no. 1, 1. 66
40 Money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age.
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) U.S. novelist. Journalist, editor and critic. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
51. Money is not, properly speaking, one of the subjects of commerce…It is none of the wheels of trade: it is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy.
David Hume (1711-76) Scottish philosopher and historian. “Of Money,” Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (1754), pt. 2, essay 3
52. The instinct of acquisitiveness has more perverts, I believe, than the instinct of sex. At any rate, people seem to me odder about money than about even their amours.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) British novelist and essayist. Point Counter Point (1928), ch. 22
53. We all know how the size of sums of money appear to vary in a remarkable way according as they are paid in or out.
Julian Huxley (1887-1975) British biologist and writer. Essays of a Biologist (1923)
54. That’s the American way. If little kids don’t aspire to make money like I did, what the hell good is this country?
Lee Iacocca (b.1924) U.S. president of Ford Motor Company, chairman and C.E.O. of Chrysler Corporation. Referring to his $20 million plus pay package in a period when the company was encouraging pay restraint among workers. Quoted in thriving on Chaos (Tom Peters; 1987)
55. The almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion throughout land.
Washington Irving (1783-1859) U.S. writer and diplomat. Wolfert’s Roost (1855)
56. Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than money.
Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954) U.S. jurist. United States v. Wunderlich (1951)
57. Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
Henry James (1843-1916) U.S. novelist. The Portrait of a Lady (1881), ch. 35
58. Lenin was right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) British economist. Economic consequences of the Peace (1919)
59. The moral problem of our age is concerned with the love of money.
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) British economist. Essays in Persuasion (1925)
60. Give the Germans five deutschmarks and they will save it. But give the British $5 and they will borrow $25 and spend it.
John Major (b.1943) British former prime minister. Said while Chancellor of the Exchequer. Interview, Daily Express (London) (May 28, 1990)
61. There is nothing so habit forming as money.
Don Marques (1878-1937) U.S. journalist and humorist. Attrib.
62. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
- Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) British novelist, short-story writer and dramatist. Of Human Bondage (1915)
63. Money is a poor man’s credit card.
Marshall McLuhan (1911-80) Canadian sociologist and author. Quoted in Maclean’s (June 1971)
64. You’ve heard money talking? Did you understand the message?
Marshall McLuhan (1911-80) Canadian sociologist and author. The Mechanical Bridge (1951)
65. In an industrial society capital is a scarce resource, but in today’s information society there’s plenty of capital. Michael R. Milken (b.1946) U.S. investment banker and financial entrepreneur. “A Chat with Michael Milken,” Forbes (July 13, 1987)
66. To mistake for wealth, is the same sort of error as to mistake the highway which may be the easiest way of getting to your house or lands, for the house and lands themselves.
John Stuart Mill (1806-73) British economist and philosopher. Principles of Political Economy, with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, 7th edition (1871)
67. Money couldn’t buy you friends but you got a better class of enemy.
Spike Milligan (1918-2002) Irish comedian and writer. Puckoon (1963)
68. Americans relate all effort, all work and all of life itself to the dollar.
Nancy Mitford (1904-73) British novelist and biographer. Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (cowritten with A. S. C. Ross; 1956)
69. I’m not in Wall Street for my health.
- P. Morgan (1837-1913) U.S. financier. Quoted in treasury of Investment Wisdom (Bernice Cohen; 1999)
70. Money is like manure. If you spread it around, it does a lot of good, but if you pile it up in one place, it stinks like hell.
Clint W. Murchison (1885-1969) U.S. entrepreneur, oil industry executive and financier. Quoted by his son Clint Murchison, JR. Time (1961)
71.A credit card is a money tool, not a supplement to money. The failure to make this distinction has “supplemented” many a poor soul right into bankruptcy.
Paula Nelson (b.1944) U.S. educator. The Joy of Money (1975)
72. Americans want action for their money. They are fascinated by its self-reproducing qualities if it’s put to work.
Paula Nelson (b.1944) U.S. educator. The Joy of Money (1975) ch. 15
73. There’s only one thing to do with loose change of course. Tighten it.
Flann O’Brien (1911-66) Irish writer. The Best of Myles (1968)
74. To make money, you have to spend money. But if you are going to make money, you have to make it with love.
Yoko Ono (b.1933) U.S. artist and musician. Interview, Playboy (January 1981)
75. Expenditure rises to meet income.
- Northcote Parkinson (1909-93) British political scientist and author. The Law and the Profits (1960)
76. All money nowadays seems to be produced with a homing instinct for the Treasury.
Prince Philip (b.1921) British consort of Queen Elizabeth II. Quoted in Observer (London) (May 26, 1963)
77. Money never remains just coins and pieces of paper. Money can be translated into the beauty of living, a support in misfortune, an education, or future security. It also can be translated into a source of bitterness.
Sylvia Porter (1913-91) U.S. journalist and finance expert. Sylvia Porter’s Money Book (1975), ch. 1
78. I finally know what distinguishes man from the other beasts: financial worries.
Jules Renard (1864-1910) French writer. 1910. Journal (1877-1910)
79. There is no such thing as a paper loss. A paper loss is a very real loss.
Jim rogers (b.1935) U.S. banker and management consultant. Quoted in Treasury of Investment Wisdom (Bernice Cohen; 1999)
80. Money is the seed of money. The first guinea is sometimes more difficult to aquire than the second million.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) French philosopher and writer. Discourse Upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind (1754)
81. My boy…always try to rub up against money, for if you rub up against money long enough, some of it may rub off on you.
Damon Runyon (1884-1946) U.S. writer and journalist. “A Very Honorable Guy,” Runyon on Broadway (1950)
82. Money that bears no relationship to reality is imaginary. It is pure inflation.
John Ralston Saul (b.1947) Canadian writer. The Unconscious Civilization (1995)
83. It is a curious and terrible thing, but for some reason it is easier for a man to raise a thousand dollars for a margin call than it is for him to raise the price of supper if he is starving.
Fred Schwed (1901?-1966) U.S. author. Where Are The Customers’ Yachts? (1940)
84. Money makes a man laugh.
John Selden (1584-1654) English jurist, antiquary and politician. Mid-17th century. Table Talk (1689)
85. He that wants money, means and content, is without three good friends.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English poet and playwright. As You Like It (1599), Act 3, Scene 2, 1. 25
86. The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Irish writer and critic. Major Barbara (1905), Preface.
87. The substitution of monetary values for all other values is pushing society toward a dangerous disequilibrium.
George Soros (b.1930) U.S financier, entrepreneur and philanthropist. The Crisis of Global Capitalism (1998)
88. Pennies don’t fall from heaven. They have to be earned on earth.
Margaret Thatcher (b.1925) British former prime minister. Quoted in “Sayings of the Week,” Observer (London) (November 18, 1979)
89. It is not wisdom to lose the capital For the sake of the interest.
Tiruvalluvar (fl. 1st century) Indian poet. The Kural, 463
90. Nobody who has wealth to distribute ever omits himself.
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) Russian revolutionary leader and Marxist theorist. Quoted in “Sayings of the Week,” Observer (London) (1937)
91. It’s not how much you earn. It’s how much you owe.
Ted Turner (b.1938) U.S. founder of Turner Broadcasting Systems. Speech (1986)
92. I’ve been learning how to give. It’s something you have to keep working on, because people like money the way they do their homes and their dogs.
Ted Turner (b.1938) U.S. founder of Turner Broadcasting Systems. New York Times (September 20, 1997)
93. The powerful have money, and money is the master of everything in a state.
Voltaire (1694-1778) French writer, philosopher and reformer. Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764)
94. One lady friend of mine asked me…”What do you love most?” That’s how I started painting money.
Andy Warhol (1928-87) U.S. artist and producer. Referring to the inspiration for his dollar sign paintings. The Andy Warhol Diaries (P. Hackett, ed.; 1989)
95. Money should circulate like rain water.
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) U.S. playwright and novelist. Spoken by Mrs. Levi. The Matchmaker (1954), Act 1
96. The venture industry doesn’t like to see new venture capitalists because it means more competition. There is always more money than deals .
Ann Winblad (b.1953) U.S. venture capitalist. www.womenswire.com (Soledad O’Brien; 2000)
97. If money is your motivation, forget it.
Oprah Winfrey (b.1954) U.S. talk show host, actor, and business executive. Quoted in Oprah Winfrey Speaks (Janet Lowe; 1998)
