Gilded Age Quotes

• Today, as in the Gilded Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective responsibility for employees - just as government has for its citizens.

  Charles Derber

  Responsibility, Government, Greed

  Charles Derber (2015). “Sociopathic Society: A People's Sociology of the United States”, p.107, Routledge

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• Theres 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

  Responsibility, Unique, Rights

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• Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational, Funny, Motivational

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• [N]o country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.

  Mark Twain

  Country, Government, Law

  Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner (1874). “The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day”, p.269

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• A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age.

  Jaron Lanier

  Average, People, Economy

  Jaron Lanier (2014). “Who Owns the Future?”, p.43, Simon and Schuster

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• I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two million dollars.

  Mark Twain

  Humor, Years, Two

  Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner (1874). “The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day”, p.243

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• Men may die, but the fabric of our free institutions remains unshaken.

  Chester A. Arthur

  Freedom, Patriotic, Men

  Chester A. Arthur's statement upon the death of President Garfield, as quoted in "Messages and Papers of the Presidents", Volume 8, 1897.

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• The free man cannot be long an ignorant man.

  William McKinley

  Men, Long, Ignorant

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• Reagan's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and license to buy the political system right out from everyone else.

  Bill Moyers

  Father, Mean, Responsibility

  "For America's Sake". Speech on December 12, 2006. "Moyers on Democracy". Book by Bill D. Moyers, p. 17, 2008.

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• Age is strictly a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

  Jack Benny

  Funny, Happy Birthday, Elderly

  New York Times, 1974.

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• The Reagan-Bush years have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.

  William J. Clinton

  Years, Greed, Age

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• For a man who has compared himself to Theodore Roosevelt and the nation's challenges to those of the Gilded Age, Obama put forward a tepid agenda.

  Ron Fournier

  Men, Challenges, Age

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

  Douglas Wilder

  America, Age, Sept 11

  "Obama-Clinton ticket for 2012" by L.Douglas Wilder, www.politico.com. August 2, 2010.

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