#gilded

In outward show so splendid and so vain; 'tis but a gilded block without a brain. ↗

— Phaedrus

#brain #gilded #outward #show #splendid

A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent. ↗

— Logan P. Smith

#gilded #mediocre #talent #tomb

An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man had money he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was free in law and not in fact. An era which had canonized hypocrisy, so that to seem to be respectable was to be. ↗

— John Galsworthy

#age

The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. They've forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics: No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House. ↗

— Maureen Dowd

#appreciate #cage #enough #especially #forgotten

Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#gilded-oats #hippogriff #the-beauty-of-impossible-things #beauty

This age thinks better of a gilded fool Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school. ↗

— Thomas Dekker

#better #fool #gilded #saint #school

There's something unique about the United States, a sense of individual rights and freedoms, and a sense of social and civic responsibility that we contributed to so much of the world. We lost that mission in the 1980s and 1990s, when we entered a gilded age, and the culture of individualism became a culture of avarice. ↗

— George Hickenlooper

#age #avarice #became #civic #contributed

We are with you in this work. Workingmen must form a party of their own, take charge of the government, dispose gilded fraud, and put honest toil in power. ↗

— Denis Kearney

#dispose #form #fraud #gilded #government

Sept. 11 jolted America out of its second gilded age. ↗

— Douglas Wilder

#america #gilded #out #second #sept

America's industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and many more based in dynastic wealth of essentially inexhaustible proportions. John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today's money, and paid no income tax. No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America. Congress tried to introduce an income tax of 2 percent on earnings of $4,000 in 1894, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Income tax wouldn't become a regular part of American Life until 1914. People would never be this rich again. Spending all this wealth became for many a more or less full-time occupation. A kind of desperate, vulgar edge became attached to almost everything they did. At one New York dinner party, guests found the table heaped with sand and at each place a little gold spade; upon a signal, they were invited to dig in and search for diamonds and other costly glitter buried within. At another party - possibly the most preposterous ever staged - several dozen horses with padded hooves were led into the ballroom of Sherry's, a vast and esteemed eating establishment, and tethered around the tables so that the guests, dressed as cowboys and cowgirls, could enjoy the novel and sublimely pointless pleasure of dining in a New York ballroom on horseback. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#money #new-york #parties #wealth #age