Academy Of Wealth Quotes

The job of feets is walking, but their hobby is dancing.

I grow and I shrink. I run and I crawl. Follow my voice, though I have none at all. I never do leave here, but I travel around I float through the sky and I creep through the ground. I keep my cache in a vault although I have no wealth, Seek my decay to safeguard your health.

She may not be the prettiest, or the smartest, or the wealthiest at the Academy, but she could be kind. Anyone could be kind.

Franklin was concerning himself more and more with public affairs. He set forth a scheme for an Academy, which was taken up later and finally developed into the University of Pennsylvania; and he founded an "American Philosophical Society" for the purpose of enabling scientific men to communicate their discoveries to one another. He himself had already begun his electrical researches, which, with other scientific inquiries, he called on in the intervals of money-making and politics to the end of his life. In 1748 he sold his business in order to get leisure for study, having now acquired comparative wealth; and in a few years he had made discoveries that gave him a reputation with the learned throughout Europe. In politics he proved very able both as an administrator and as a controversialist; but his record as an office-holder is stained by the use he made of his position to advance his relatives. His most notable service in home politics was his reform of the postal system; but his fame as a statesman rests chiefly on his services in connection with the relations of the Colonies with Great Britain, and later with France.

[The eighteenth century] was the century, as we are frequently told, of women - the intellectual life of women in salons, women wielding unseen influence, women as members of academies, theatrical productions whose success depended on the power of actresses to charm; in the economic sphere, financiers amassing great fortunes in order to marry their daughters into the aristocracy, and women ruling over whole peoples and empires: Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Queen Elisabeth Farnese of Spain, as well as the likes of Mme du Pompadour and Mme du Barry. It was as if some residual matriarchy - the oldest culture of the Mediterranean - was struggling to emerge from the blood and the collective unconscious; as if the time would one day return when, in every tribe, it was the women who possessed wealth and power and the men who 'married out', moving into the wife's extended family, where they became gentle, pampered, more or less superfluous drones. [...] In the century of women, it was inevitable that these erotic legends should attach themselves to the outstanding female figures of the time [...] and all this applied even more strongly in France. It was there that women reached the greatest positions of power, and there that this erotic momentum was at its strongest, by virtue of the traditions and nature of the French people.

The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. What country do you want to live in?

Conformity, however, both promotes despair and offers a way for a man or woman to deny his or her despair through self-deception. “Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself,” wrote Wittgenstein and one of the forms of deception used by the conformist is to claim that there is nothing wrong with his way of life, rather there is merely something wrong with the external conditions of it. “I have not climbed enough rungs on the ladder of social-success and attained enough wealth and status,” the conformist claims. Or the conformist blames friends or family members for his unhappiness and as a result of these rationalizations and the belief that the good life is a product of attaining certain external values he doubles down on his commitment to conformity and in the process moves ever further away from recognizing that his despair is rooted in his one-sided preoccupation with externals. If these self-deceptions fail to push his feelings of despair outside the periphery of awareness then the conformist turns to alcohol, drugs, or the distracting pull of screens to help him remain oblivious as to the true nature and depths of his despair.

The second approach to heroism is taken by those who feel they can lift themselves slightly above the other sheep by attaining status and wealth. In answering Becker’s question: “”what is my contribution to the world?”, or, “where do I rank as a hero?”” (Becker, The Ernest Becker Reader), the status-and-wealth obsessed individual goes the way of the peacock. They seek to accumulate consumer goods, more expensive cars and bigger homes, not just for practicality or enjoyment, but in the naïve hope that social status, likes and attention, can alleviate their existential fears.

After coming to the realization that one’s inner self, or soul, is all important, Socrates believed the next step in the path towards self knowledge was to obtain knowledge of what is good and what is evil, and in the process use what one learns to cultivate the good within one’s soul and purge the evil from it. Most people dogmatically assume they know what is truly good and what is truly evil. They regard things such as wealth, status, pleasure, and social acceptance as the greatest of all goods in life, and think that poverty, death, pain, and social rejection are the greatest of all evils. However, Socrates disagreed with these answers, and also believed this view to be extremely harmful. All human beings naturally strive after happiness, thought Socrates, for happiness is the final end in life and everything we do we do because we think it will make us happy. We therefore label what we think will bring us happiness as ‘good’, and those things we think will bring us suffering and pain as ‘evil’. So it follows that if we have a mistaken conception of what is good, then we will spend our lives frantically chasing after things that will not bring us happiness even if we attain them. However, according to Socrates if one devoted themselves to self-knowledge and philosophical inquiry, they would soon be led to a more appropriate view of the good. There is one supreme good, he claimed, and possession of this good alone will secure our happiness. This supreme good, thought Socrates, is virtue. Virtue is defined as moral excellence, and an individual is considered virtuous if their character is made up of the moral qualities that are accepted as virtues. In Ancient Greece commonly accepted virtues included courage, temperance, prudence, and justice. Socrates held virtue to be the greatest good in life because it alone was capable of securing ones happiness. Even death is a trivial matter for the truly virtuous individual who realizes that the most important thing in life is the state of his soul and the actions which spring from it.

But social justice, or the attempt to make us all more equal using the force of the state, will not bring about a society less prone to envy. In fact, as this unnatural uniformity is enforced on a society new sources of envy will emerge which are far more pernicious. For example, if somehow, all were made equal in terms of material wealth, this would not rid the world of envy. Rather it would only mean that those prone to envy would direct their attention to other forms of inequality, such as inequalities in mental and physical characteristics. Schopenhauer warned of this type of envy, writing that envy “directed against personal qualities is the most insatiable and poisonous because the envious is left without hope; it is also the lowest type of envy for it hates what it ought to love and respect.” (Arthur Schopenhauer)

Another factor: Christianity offered opportunities for advancement in the church to intelligent young men, some of whom might otherwise have become mathematicians or scientists. Bishops and presbyters were generally exempt from the jurisdiction of the ordinary civil courts, and from taxation. A bishop such as Cyril of Alexandria or Ambrose of Milan could exercise considerable political power, much more than a scholar at the Museum in Alexandria or the Academy in Athens. This was something new. Under paganism religious offices had gone to men of wealth or political power, rather than wealth and power going to men of religion. For instance, Julius Caesar and his successors won the office of supreme pontiff, not as a recognition of piety or learning, but as a consequence of their political power.

He has watched every dream he has ever had of Iraq becoming a peaceful, prosperous country dashed, both by the hatred of the Islamists and by the West’s neglect.”  He took another drag on the cigarette.  “But he still believes that a man’s honor must be tied to his word.  That is a uniquely Western viewpoint, you know?  Here, a man’s honor is tied to how much esteem he is held in, in the perception of his wealth and his family.”  He blew the smoke skyward.  The sun was dipping toward the perpetual haze that stole its strength about an hour before it actually set.  “I don’t know where he got the idea; he has never traveled to England or America that I know.  He has been to several foreign military academies, back before the embargo after the war in the ‘90s.”  He turned to look at me, his face serious.  “He has given his word that he wants to be a Praetorian.  He means it.  He will honor it.  Which means these men, his tribesmen, will honor it as well.

The contrast between the events of our life predetermined by fate, and the inner fortress of freedom we have the potential to cultivate, delimits the key tenet of Stoicism: “Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us.” (Epictetus) According to the Stoics, most things are not up to us, or in other words are beyond our control. The actions and opinions of other people, our health, our reputation, and the amount of wealth we amass, are examples of things not up to us. These things can be influenced one way or another through our actions, but ultimately they are things outside of our complete control. The things which are up to us, or within our complete control, are the things which emanate from our mind – for example our opinions, judgments, beliefs, desires, and goals. According to the Stoics misery and suffering result from the fact that people make their happiness dependent on things which are ultimately outside of their control and in doing so enslave themselves.

What is more, in the Age of Affluence access to luxuries, pleasures, and comforts abound, and even commoners possess the wealth and leisure to indulge in them. “A spoiled society begins to rot from within.”, William Ophuls explains. In adapting themselves to abundance, the people grow incapable of enduring even mild forms of hardship and suffering, and as the often repeated saying goes, good times create weak men. “Prosperity ripened the principle of decay.”, Edward Gibbon explained in reference to Rome.

... For the first Cynics probably did not fight in any battles, and they certainly condemned war as another instance of the idiocy of custom (nomos). Critiques of war surface as early as Homer's Achilles; there is a strong deprecation of war in both Herodotus and intellectual communities like the Academy and Lyceum. In their idealism, the Cynics made such critiques far more radical. For, according to them, why would one fight a war? If it were for the sake of wealth or honor, then what are wealth and honor? True wealth is self-sufficiency, not the coin and plunder that contemporary mercenaries covet. Honor is but a word, a "mere scutcheon;' and the Cynics will have none of it. The feckless wars of the late fifth and fourth centuries could only deepen this sense of disillusion: now Athens, now Sparta, now Thebes, now Jason of Pherae, now Philip, now Antigonus, now Seleucus, now some other king is in the ascendant, each contending furiously for the hegemony and spot of distinction. Yet, in the end, all this ambition comes to nothing, for all its objects are subject to the caprices of Tuche; in the end, even Alexander is just a wanderer with his shadow. It is more honest to reject the false absolutes of wealth, honor, and fatherland. Wisdom is seeing through such false notions and freeing oneself from the tyranny of customary language and thought-patterns. The true absolute is the self and in the self, all other values are recovered.

In effect government control of an economy replaces a mechanism that makes use of the knowledge of millions or billions of people, depending on the extent of the market, with control by a relatively small group of politicians and bureaucrats whose knowledge is severely limited. With nothing effective to replace the price system with, socialist countries – as evidenced by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the despair that exists in countries such as North Korea – can never be as prosperous as countries which have freer markets. Ironically, while many who support socialism are also champions of economic equality, history has shown that when countries try to stamp out the spontaneous wealth generating process associated with free markets they create the worst type of inequality possible; a society where the masses starve while the central planners live like royalty.

Hypatia, the daughter of Theon, the mathematician, endeavored to continue the old-time instructions. Each day before her academy stood a long train of chariots; her lecture-room was crowded with the wealth and fashion of Alexandria. They came to listen to her discourses on those questions which man in all ages has asked, but which have never yet been answered: "What am I? Where am I? What can I know?" Hypatia and Cyril; philosophy and bigotry; they cannot exist together. As Hypatia repaired to her academy, she was assaulted by (Saint) Cyril's mob—a mob of many monks. Stripped naked in the street, she was dragged into a church, and there killed by the club of

One of the most startling findings from the Mystery Experiment was described in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in late 2022. It estimated that the anonymous couple’s donation had effectively created a more than 200x multiple of the amount of happiness that their $2 million could ever have given them personally. The paper has been cited as one of the most powerful arguments yet for the case for the rich to be generous with their wealth.