The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity. – Alan Gregg
What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven. – Friedrich Holderlin
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence — those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. – Aldous Huxley, Island
It takes more strength of character to withstand good fortune than bad. – La Rochefoucauld, Reflections, 1665
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, Progress and Poverty, 1879
Men can bear all things except good days. – Dutch Proverb [Quoted in Henry G. Bohn, A Polyglot of Foreign Proverbs comprisin
Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. – Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950
Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day. – Bill Vaughan
When prosperity comes, do not use all of it. – Confucius
Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity. – Goethe
Luxury: The lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master. – Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923
Pearls around the neck – stones upon the heart. – Hanan J. Ayalti, Yiddish Proverbs, 1949
We cannot get grace from gadgets. In the Bakelite house of the future, the dishes may not break, but the heart can. Even a man with ten shower baths may find life flat, stale and unprofitable. – J.B. Priestley
Luxury… corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness. – Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762
We face the question whether a still higher “standard of living” is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. – Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger. – Frank Lloyd Wright
Human prosperity never rests but always craves more, till blown up with pride it totters and falls. From the opulent mansions pointed at by all passers-by none warns it away, none cries, “Let no more riches enter!” – Aeschylus
In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires. – Benjamin Franklin
It is generally agreed, that few men are made better by affluence or exaltation. – Samuel Johnson
As prosperity is promoted, thinking is demoted. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
