Things, things, things. Always more things, and success is seen as the abundance of things.
I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic - if we can call it that - between high and low. Maybe it's because I was not born or brought up in affluence.
True affluence is to not need anything.
The penalty of affluence is that it cuts one off from the common lot, common experience, and common fellowship. In a sense it outlaws one automatically from one's birthright of membership in the great human family.
The state has typically been a device for producing affluence for a few at the expense of many.
Affluence creates poverty.
Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.
The interesting thing is, while we die of diseases of affluence from eating all these fatty meats, our poor brethren in the developing world die of diseases of poverty, because the land is not used now to grow food grain for their families.
The happiness promised us in Christ does not consist in outward advantages-such as leading a joyous and peaceful life, having rich possessions, being safe from all harm, and abounding with delights such as the flesh commonly longs after. No, our happiness belongs to the heavenly life!
Works of Art can only be produc'd in Perfection where the Man is either in Affluence or is Above the Care of it.
I am unpersuaded that relative poverty and hard work are greater adversities than relative affluence and free time.
What pleasure can those over-happy persons know, who, from their affluence and luxury, always eat before they are hungry and drink before they are thirsty?
The scarcity that afflicts the world is not the fault of either science or nature. The cause is defective economic institutions which abort technology's affluence producing potential.
Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.
It was only in the late nineteenth century and then the twentieth century, with the maturation of consumer capitalism, that a shift was made toward the cultivation of unbounded desire. We must appreciate this to realize that late modern consumption, consumption as we now know it, is not fundamentally about materialism or the consumption of physical goods. Affluence and consumer-oriented capitalism have moved us well beyond the undeniable efficiencies and benefits of refrigeration and indoor plumbing.
We may feel the pain of falling back from a level of affluence to which we have grown accustomed, but most people in developed countries are still, by historical standards, extraordinarily well off.
Unfortunately, our affluent society has also been an effluent society.
The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.
The system that had grown up in most states is that wealthy districts with an affluent population can afford to spend a lot more on their public school systems than the poorer districts.
The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
