The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
—John Berger (b. 1926)
To get wealth and security by guile
Is like one who pours water into a pot of unbaked clay.
—Tiruvalluvar (c. 5th century A.D.)
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)