People go on postponing everything that is meaningful. Tomorrow they will laugh; today, money has to be gathered... more money, more power, more things, more gadgets. Tomorrow they will love - today there is no time. But tomorrow never comes, and one day they find themselves burdened with all kinds of gadgets, burdened with money. They have come to the top of the ladder - and there is nowhere to go except to jump in a lake.
Money nowadays is money; money brings office; money gains friends; everywhere the poor man is down.
[Lat., In pretio pretium nunc est; dat census honores,
Census amicitias; pauper ubique jacet.]
Welles and I differed, however, in our interpretation of the results of the Munich Conference, he being optimistic, I skeptical. In a radio address on October 3, several days after the conference, in which he described the steps taken by the United States Government just prior to Munich, he said that today, perhaps more than at any time during the past two decades, there was presented the opportunity for the establishment by the nations of the world of a new world order based upon justice and upon law. It seemed to me that the colors in the picture were much darker.
What we also have to recognize is that the deficit levels that I'm inheriting, over a trillion dollars, coming out of last year, that that is unsustainable. At a certain point, other countries stop buying our debt, at a certain point, we'd end up having to raise interest rates, and it would end up creating more economic chaos and potentially inflation.
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.