Wealth You Can't Enjoy But Others Envy Unknowingly

I laughed  and laughed over this one.

1st Century Greek Philosopher.  PLUTARCH 

"He who gets a dowry with his wife sells himself for it, as Euripides says, but his gains are few and uncertain; but he who does not go all on fire through many a funeral pile, but through a regal pyre, full of panting and fear and sweat got from travelling over the sea as a merchant, has the wealth of Tantalus, but cannot enjoy it owing to his want of leisure. For that Sicyonian horse-breeder was wise, who gave Agamemnon as a present a swift mare, "that he should not follow him to wind-swept Ilium, but delight himself at home,"  in the quiet enjoyment of his abundant riches and painless leisure. But nowadays courtiers, and people who think they have a turn for affairs, thrust themselves forward of their own accord uninvited into courts and toilsome escorts and bivouacs, that they may get a horse, or brooch, or some such piece of good luck. "But his wife is left behind in Phylace, and tears her cheeks in her sorrow, and his house is only half complete without him," while he is dragged about, and wanders about, and wastes his time in idle hopes, and has to put up with much insult. And even if he gets any of those things he desires, giddy and dizzy at Fortune's rope-dance, he seeks retirement, and deems those happy who live obscure and in security, while they again look up admiringly at him who soars so high above their heads."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals

My Church Is Richer Than Jesus!

"To me it is not possible, O my God, to be rich and at ease and enjoy a prosperous life, when you were poor, struggling, living laboriously. I cannot love thus. ’It is not right that the servant should be above his Master, nor that the Bride should be rich and the Bridegroom poor,’ especially when he is voluntarily poor. S. Teresa, wearied with the importunities of those who wished her to accept endowments for her convent at Avila, was once almost ready to accept. But when she went to her oratory and saw the Crucifix she fell at the feet of Jesus, hanging naked on the Cross, and implored of him the grace never to let her receive any endowments, but always to be as poor as he was....."

- Charles de Foucauld. Méditations of a Hermit.

Expelling Systems

" I watch how foolishly man guards his nothing - there by keeping us out,. True truly, God is hated here.

-  Street graffiti in Albuquerque New Mexico, as told by Richard Rohr

No Economic Gods

"I begin by looking at market economics. The market is a powerful Institution for resource allocation and wealth creation. However, conservatives must resist market dogmatism. Policy-making does not occur within a textbook version of reality. It happens in the real world, with trade-offs, imperfect options, and non-economic considerations. Markets are a tool of good economic policy, but they are not an objective in and of themselves.

Groing public concerns about economic dislocation and trade are far from being without merit. However, they require a careful response that resorts neither to protectionism nor state dependency. People want meaningful work, as well as the financial security and personal dignity that comes with it. Conservatives must be champions for paid work and must set out an agenda that creates the conditions for it"

- Stephen Harper 

Wasted Life Of Sneers and Jeers

"Repudiating my father's values, which were solidly bourgeois to the point of farce, I had repudiated the whole middle class and had wasted a lifetime's energies in sneers and jeers....  The rulers of the world have become, in enslaving the masses of the poor, completely enslave themselves by their sad possessions. "

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure. A Journey On Two Rivers