You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.

Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.

Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever while you live, expense is constant and certain: and it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel.

I spend my money on my props and my creations. I’m an inventor.

Look at our society. Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everyone wants to live long, but few will exercise. Everybody wants money, yet seldom will anyone budget or control their spending.

Prosperity cannot be restored by raids upon the public Treasury.

There are only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of a nation. The first is taxation. The second is repudiation. The third is inflation.

Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That’s not possible on $1 a day.

Taxpayers have long memories, especially when it comes to how their hard-earned money is spent.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

When I was a kid, there were no credit cards. Instead, retailers offered layaway plans. My mom would go to a store, such as a furniture outlet, choose the sofa she wanted, and put it on layaway. That meant she put a little money down to hold the sofa, and every payday she’d pay a little toward the purchase.

Thrift is of great revenue.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.

Money often costs too much.

The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.

No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.

I haven’t been as wild with my money as somebody like me might have been. I’ve been very safe, very conservative with investments. I don’t blow money. I don’t have a ton of houses. I know things can go away. I’ve already had that experience.

Americans are in a cycle of fear which leads to people not wanting to spend and not wanting to make investments, and that leads to more fear. We’ll break out of it. It takes time.

I know it’s going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we’re in. You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money.

Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

All that seems indispensible in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former.

I would say raising capital is one of the weakest things for most entrepreneurs.

If you look at space companies, they’ve failed either because they’ve had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think.

Rather go to bed without dinner than to rise in debt.

Riches are a good hand maiden, but a poor mistress.

If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher’s stone.

In the late 19th century there was a major union organization, Knights of Labor, and also a radical populist movement based on farmers. It’s hard to believe, but it was based in Texas, and it was quite radical. They wanted their own banks, their own cooperatives, their own control over sales and commerce.

I always try to be smart. I try to treat all the money I’m making like it’s the last time I’m going to make it.

Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.

It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

The use of money is all the advantage there is in having it.

I’m interested in movement, and I’m interested in money, and I’m interested in the movement of money.

My dad was fiscally conservative, and I was influenced by that. He didn’t believe in spending more than you had because it gets you into trouble.