It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.
The people with money to build today are corporations - they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.
A peculiarity of capital is that it cannot be employed productively without benefiting the community in which it is used.
Of all the nations in the Western world, the United States, with the most money and the most time, has the fewest readers of books per capita. This is an incalculable loss. This, too, is one of the few civilized nations in the world which is unable to support a single magazine devoted solely to books.
We now know that something between 85 and 90 percent of most software product features are unwanted and unneeded by customers. That is an enourmous ammount of waste of time and money that ends up on the floor.
Nevertheless, the Tenth Commandment-'Thou shalt not covet'-recognizes that making money and owning things could become selfish activities. But it is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but love of money for its own sake. The spiritual dimension comes in deciding what one does with the wealth. How could we respond to the many calls for help, or invest for the future, or support the wonderful artists or craftsmen whose work also glorifies God, unless we had first worked hard and used our talents to create the necessary wealth?
Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.
I have a couple ideas that I'm banging on for a film. It's strange, you make a movie and, all of a sudden, your agents are calling you and saying, "Hey, I know these guys with some money who are looking to finance something. " You're like, "Oh, god, now I've gotta come up with something really amazing. "
I don't feel like taking anybody's money.
It's hard in a monetary system to trust people.
I don't want anything I don't deserve, but if they offer me more money, I'm not stupid.
I told my broker that as long as he doesn't tell me where my money should go, I won't tell him where he should go.
The greedy search for money or success will almost always lead men into unhappiness. Why? Because that kind of life makes them depend upon things outside themselves.
Automating a mess yields an automated mess.
A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.
Like grain in a time of famine, the immense resources which the nation does in fact possess go not to the child in the greatest need but to the children of the highest bidder-the child of parents who, more frequently than not, have also enjoyed the same abundance when they were schoolchildren.
Through money or power you cannot solve all problems. The problem in the human heart must be solved first.
I came here with nothing, with maybe a hundred bucks in my pocket and had to get a job. And these wealthy people who had made their money themselves, I worked for. It did show me what could be achieved in America, what's possible if you have some vision to take big risks.
If I had that kind of money, I wouldn't come to Vietnam, I'd send for it.
Money doesn't bring courage, I learned. It's the other way around. Once I took that lesson to heart, I began to rebuild my life.