Trade it may help, society extend,
But lures the Pirate, ant corrupts the friend:
It raises armies in a nation's aid,
But bribes a senate, and the land's betray'd.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.
So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live.
The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty . . . . Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys basic people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people.
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.
All the money in the world is no use to a man or his country if he spends it as fast as he makes it. All he has left is his bills and the reputation for being a fool.
All things are sold: the very light of heaven is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love, the smallest and most despicable things that lurk in the abysses of the deep, all objects of our life, even life itself, and the poor pittance which the laws allow of liberty, the fellowship of man, those duties which his heart of human love should urge him to perform instinctively, are bought and sold as in a public mart of not disguising selfishness, that sets on each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.