Our democratic societies rest on a meritocratic worldview, or at any rate a meritocratic hope, by which I mean a belief in a society in which inequality is based more on merit and effort than on kinship and rents. This belief and this hope play a very crucial role in modern society, for a simple reason: in a democracy, the professed equality of rights of all citizens contrasts sharply with the very real inequality of living conditions, and in order to overcome this contradiction it is vital to make sure that social inequalities derive from rational and universal principles rather than arbitrary contingencies. Inequalities must therefore be just and useful to all, at least in the realm of discourse and as far as possible in reality as well.

— Thomas Piketty

People used to make money, but somewhere along the way, it started making us.

— Trevor D. Richardson

Reliability investing requires finding companies trading below their inherent worth--stocks with strong fundamentals including earnings, dividends, book value, and cash flow selling at bargain prices give their quality.

— Amah Lambert

The goal of retirement is to live off your assets-not on them

— Frank Eberhart

The man and husband of the household is responsible for the way your family’s income is managed.

— Jim George

The purpose of diversification is so that when one investment goes down or is not doing well, you are insulated from the result because of the others you have in place. In a job or career, most of us are trying to specialize so much so that we've ended up with all of our eggs in the same basket. That's not managing risk at all. That's putting yourself at risk." - Chris Lutz

— Chris Lutz

The vast majority of Americans, at all coordinates of the economic spectrum, consider themselves middle class; this is a deeply ingrained, distinctly American cognitive dissonance.

— Ellen Cushing

Think about this for a second. Why is it that we would not invest even a single dollar without diversifying it and managing risk, but do exactly the opposite, putting all of our eggs in one basket, with our regular income in our careers?" - Chris Lutz, Modular Career Design

— Chris Lutz

Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis. Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war.

— Nikola Tesla

Too often we assume that God has increased our income to increase our standard of living, when his stated purpose is to increase our standard of giving. (Look again at 2 Corinthians 8:14 and 9:11).

— Randy Alcorn