You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.

It is the nature of a business community that it deals with the covert forms of power in economic life and to be insensible to the significance and the complexity of more overt forms of power, even as it is insensible to the motive of the lust for power as an element in human nature.

Americans believe that the bottom line isn't everything, it's the only thing, and America is strangling on that lack of vision."13 Bennis also noted, "It isn't either a bull or a bear market anymore, it's a pig market."14

It is strange that when people have so much, they are so anxious about not having enough—to do, to see, to own, to fix, to control, to change.

The denied sins that are really destroying the world are much more the sins that we often admire and fully accept in our public figures: pride, ambition, greed, gluttony, false witness, legitimated killing, vanity, et cetera. That is hard to deny.

Many people are driven by materialism. Their desire to acquire becomes the whole goal of their lives. This drive to always want more is based on the misconceptions that having more will make me more happy, more important, and more secure, but all three ideas are untrue. Possessions only provide temporary happiness. Because things do not change, we eventually become bored with them and then want newer, bigger, better versions.

The bourgeois takes economic power very seriously, and often worships it quite unselfishly.

The longer I go on, the more I am aware of the power of finance.

Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power.

The Americans have no faith, they rely on the power of a dollar; they are deaf to sentiment.

Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap.

The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.