While poor panting millionaires, poor tired earls and poor God-forsaken American men of culture are plodding about Italy for literary inspiration, Charles Dickens made up the whole of that Italian romance... from the faces of two London organ grinders.
My grandfather retired from active business on the eve of that great financial epoch, to grapple with which his talents were well adapted; and when the wars and loans of the Revolution were about to create those families of millionaires, in which he might probably have enrolled his own. That, however, was not our destiny. My grandfather had only one child, and nature had disqualified him, from his cradle, for the busy pursuits of men.
We think we have got freedom of the press. When one millionaire has ten newspapers and ten million people have no newspapers—that is not freedom of the press.
If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves—that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive—are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. ...crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible... [owing] less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth...
I'm a millionaire, I'm a multi-millionaire, I'm filthy rich. You know why I'm a multi-millionaire? 'Cause multi-millions like what I do. That's pretty good, isn't it? There's millions that believe in what I do. Pretty cool, huh?
Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
The first bias [in The Millionaire Next Door] comes from the fact that the rich people selected... are among the lucky monkeys... [T]hey saw only the winners. They make no mention of the "accumulators" who have accumulated the wrong things... There is a way to take care of the bias: Lower the wealth of your average millionaire by, say, 50%... the bias causes the average net worth to be higher by such... in adding the effect of the losers into the pot...
Though they suffer no restriction of choice, in reality even multi-millionaires soon reach the outer limits of purely personal gratification—which should be some satisfaction to the rest of us.