Wealth...................

"Society is barbarous, until every industrious man can get his
living without dishonest customs.
     "Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer.
He fails to make his place good in the world, unless he not
only pays his debt, but also adds something to the common
wealth.  Nor can he do justice to his genius, without making
some larger demand on the world than a bare subsistence.
He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich."

".....good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose."

"Wealth brings its own checks and balances.  The basis of
political economy is non-interference.  The only safe rule is
found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply.  Do
not legislate.  Meddle, and you snap the sinews with your
sumptuary laws.  Give no bounties: make equal laws:
secure life and property, and you need not give alms.  Open
the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue, and they will
do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands.
In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the
idle and imbecile, to the industrious, brave and persevering."

"The level of the sea is not more surely kept, than is the
equilibrium of value in society, by the demand and supply:
artifice or legislation punishes itself, by reactions, gluts,
and bankruptcies.

"Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him
to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus
makes him necessary to society."

"I think we are entitled to draw a straight line, and say, that
society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt,
until every man does that which he was created to do."

-all quotes excerpted from Ralph Waldo Emerson's
essay, Wealth