Sublime

I could never tell from inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so-called rich man or a poor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed, the more you have of such things the poorer you are.

At any rate, the people sitting around Sam’s living room and talking about where Sam’s money was being spent weren’t talking about buying bed nets for children in Africa, to prevent malaria. They were looking for clever ways to reduce existential risk. The sums they were able to give away were about to increase dramatically—or so they all imagined.

Society has us believing that wealth is an absolute perfected by material possessions and reckless consumption. In fact, I’ve had to tailor the “hook” of this book to society’s definition of wealth’s

The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.

The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’

wealth will probably be increasingly redistributed from those who have a lot of it to those who don’t have enough of it in one way or another.

Rich is way more than most other people have. But we know the fallacy of the myth of more. More is like a mirage. We can never reach it because it isn’t real. John Stuart Mill once said, “Men do not desire to be rich, only to be richer than other men.” In other words, as soon as rich becomes available to the likes of us, it will no longer be rich.

(Progressive taxes, such as the income tax, fall more heavily on the rich than the poor.)