Gilded Age Quotes

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

The free man cannot be long an ignorant man.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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