Nearly all rich and powerful people are not notably talented, educated, charming or good-looking. They become rich and powerful by wanting to be rich and powerful.
Ordinary people understand that the rich and powerful bully the poor and meek.
The rich and powerful want to believe in their right to be rich and powerful, so they justify it by saying they are inherently superior to the poor and lowly.
The English language needs a word for that feeling you get when you badly need help, but there is no one you can call because you're not popular enough to have friends, not rich enough to have employees, and not powerful enough to have lackeys. It is a very distinct cocktail of impotence, loneliness and a sudden stark assessment of your non-worth to society? Enturdment?
It is simply that America is very rich and very powerful and generally speaking everybody hates the rich and the powerful.
All of the incessant debate about development assistance, and whether the rich are doing enough to help the poor, actually concerns less than 1% of rich world income. The effort required of the rich is indeed so slight that to do less is to announce brazenly to a large part of the world: 'You count for nothing.' We should not be surprised, then, if in later years the rich reap the whirlwind of that heartless response.
When greedy people are given gold, they are bitter that they haven't gotten jewels; when they are made barons they are resentful that they haven't been made lords. Though powerful and rich, their attitude is that of beggars. For those who know how to be content, simple fare is more delicious than rich delicacies, a cloth coat is warmer than fox fur, and an ordinary citizen does not defer to a king or a lord.
Powerful dictatorships that make their leaders powerful need to stage wars to get ordinary people to march in lockstep like mindless Nazi robots. That is the road to Greatness.
The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.
The world's proverb is, "God help the poor, for the rich can help themselves;" but to our mind, it is just the rich who have most need of Heaven's help. Dives in scarlet is worse off than Lazarus in rags, unless Divine love shall uphold him.
In order to be able to make and keep commitments... to enduring, intimate relationships... you need to be a certain kind of person. You need to be a powerful person. Powerful people take responsibility for their lives and choices. Powerful people choose who they want to be with, what they are going to pursue in life, and how they are going to go after it.
Words are powerful. The tongue is powerful. And when you write it down, and record it, and press it up, it's 100 million times more powerful. It's important to utilize our tongue to help people.
Not the children of the rich or of the powerful only, but of all alike, boys and girls, both noble and ignoble, rich and poor, in all cities and towns, villages and hamlets, should be sent to school
Asia is rich in people, rich in culture and rich in resources. It is also rich in trouble.
Becoming rich isn't as much about getting rich financially as about whom you become, in character and mind, to get rich. I want to share a secret with you that few people know: the fastest way to get rich and stay rich is to work on developing you! The idea is to grow yourself into a successful person. Again, your outer world is merely a reflection of your inner world. You are the root; your results are the fruits.
There is little incentive even for the media to encourage whistle-blowing or ruffling powerful feathers. They lose advertising, are harassed by government and cut off from the all-important 'A' lists of the rich and the powerful.