While admiring the pleasing evidence of wealth, we become complicit in - or, at the very least, recognize the extent to which we, too, are beneficiaries of - an economic system we routinely deplore.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts.
We exist to have our wealth moved up the economic chain out of our reach.
That human beings seek their own well-being and that of those close to them is not an especially provocative discovery. What is important is that this universal aspect of human nature persists no matter what economic system is in place; it merely expresses itself in different forms.
Our main task is not to see that people of great wealth add to it, but that those without much money have a greater chance to earn some.
The product of extraordinary wealth allied to a taste for the sumptuous.
In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth.
To despise riches, may, indeed, be philosophic, but to dispense them worthily, must surely be more beneficial to mankind.
However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some 'Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.'
With respect to the first of these obstacles, it has often been made a matter of grave complaint against Political Economists, that they confine their attention to Wealth, and disregard all consideration of Happiness or Virtue.
So I'm definitely in favour of stimulating the dynamic wealth creation sectors of the economy.
No opposing quotes found.