Great Fortunes Quotes

#1. I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.

Peter Matthiessen

#2. A lot of great fortunes in the world have been made by owning a single wonderful business. If you understand the business, you don't need to own very many of them.

Warren Buffett

#3. God, how patient are Thy poor! These corporations and masters of manipulation in finance heaping up great fortunes by a system of legalized extortion, and then exacting from the contributors-to whom a little means so much-a double share to guard the treasure!

Robert M. La Follette, Sr.

#4. What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#5. Why should men leave great fortunes to their children? If this is done from affection, is it not misguided affection? Observation teaches that, generally speaking, it is not well for the children that they should be so burdened.

Andrew Carnegie

#6. Almost all great fortunes are based upon one cracking good idea and the guts to go with it

Frederick Forsyth

#7. Most great fortunes are built slowly. They are based on the principle of compound interest, what Albert Einstein called, "The greatest power in the universe."

Brian Tracy

#8. We see men who have accumulated great fortunes, but we often recognize only their triumph, overlooking the temporary defeats which they had to surmount before arriving.

Napoleon Hill

#9. The majority of the great fortunes were "won not by doing evil, but as an incident to action which has benefited the community as a whole.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#10. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

Henry George

#11. Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was business; but now when great fortunes are only made by business: Business is war!

Christian Nestell Bovee

#12. The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, forgotten because it was properly done.

Honore De Balzac

#13. I believe with great fortunes come great responsibility, so with our family's assets and many wealthy friends, we could help raise a lot of money to help others.

Eric Trump

#14. business men accumulate great fortunes, by giving before they try to get.

Napoleon Hill

#15. The great fortunes of our day have rarely been accumulated through the sale of the most meaningful items and services, such as poetry or relationship counselling.

Alain De Botton

#16. One must realize that all who have accumulated great fortunes first did a certain amount of dreaming, hoping, wishing, desiring, and planning before they acquired money.

Napoleon Hill

#17. Men in great fortunes are strangers to themselves, and while they are in the puzzle of business, they have no time to tend their health either of body or mind.

John Locke

#18. Many have been ruined by their fortunes, and many have escaped ruin by the want of fortune. To obtain it the great have become little, and the little great.

Johann Georg Zimmermann

#19. Patriotism depends as much on mutual suffering as on mutual success; and it is by that experience of all fortunes and all feelings that a great national character is created.

Benjamin Disraeli

#20. When the houses of the great collapse
Many little people are slain.
Those who have no share in the fortunes of the mighty
Often have a share in their misfortunes. The plunging
wain
Drags the sweating beasts with it into the abyss.

Bertolt Brecht

#21. In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbors.

Benjamin Disraeli

#22. Let us remember, when we are inclined to be disheartened, that the private soldier is a poor judge of the fortunes of a great battle.

William Ralph Inge

#23. Like so many great American fortunes, the Rosewater pile was accumulated in the beginning by a humorless, constipated Christian farm boy turned speculator and briber during and after the Civil War.

Kurt Vonnegut

#24. My father, John Steinbeck, was a man who held human history in great reverence, and in particular the biographies of those people who had risked their lives, their fortunes, and their worldly honor to defend the rights and prerogatives of those who were powerless to defend themselves.

Thomas Steinbeck

#25. Fear not, Cesario, take thy fortunes up. Be that thou know'st thou art and then thou art as great as that thou fear'st.

William Shakespeare

#26. The great personal fortunes in the country weren't built on a portfolio of fifty companies. They were built by someone who identified one wonderful business. With each investment you make, you should have the courage and the conviction to place at least 10% of your net worth in that stock.

Warren Buffett

#27. America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression - just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it.

Elizabeth Warren

#28. Too many people are frightened. They want youth to last. They complain bitterly if sickness comes. But the world is always in tumult, and fortunes rise and fall and fail. It is the ambitious who accomplish things. It takes courage to be ambitious, for never was anything great achieved without risk.

Jeff Wheeler

#29. She told fortunes for a living. It's a wacky book and was great fun to write. It is very much a look at what life was like for women in Australia in the 1960's.

Colleen McCullough

#30. With a novelist's sense of drama and a historian's understanding of the social forces that shape our lives, Tom Gjelten has captured vividly
through the chronicle of a powerful family's fortunes
one of the great political dramas of our time.

Ronald Steel

#31. There is in the world today a great and mysterious force that shapes the fortunes of millions of people. It is called the stock market.

Robert Wright

#32. She then had one of those sudden inspirations which only people of genius receive in great crises, in supreme moments which are to decide their fortunes or their lives.

Alexandre Dumas