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Gilded Age Quotes

Browse 32 quotes about Gilded Age.

Gilded Age Quotes

“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.”

WealthMoneyNew YorkPartiesGilded Age
Book:At Home: A Short History of Private Life
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“Person 1: Do you know how America's class system works? Person 2: America has a class system? Person 1: Yes, that's how it works.”

WealthInequalityMinimum WageAffluenceClass StruggleClass WarfarePlutocracyClass SystemGilded AgeThe One Percent
Book:Limitarianism The Case Against Extreme Wealth, The Psychology of Management & Get Sh*t Done 3 Books Collection Set
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“Miners were like insignificant carpenter ants; their entire life and purpose was simply to bore through hard substances, whereby destroying nature and themselves in the grueling process. Meanwhile, men like Huxley,, Carnegie and Frick were the very select few who were reaping the gargantuan rewards of gold, or in this case, coal and steel.”

LaborAmerican HistoryClass WarfareChild LaborGilded AgeCoal MinerSteel And Coal
Book:A Blazing Gilded Age
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“If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there's no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We're averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we're back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government.”

GovernmentPoliticsWealthyPolitical PartiesRepublicansDemocratsCampaign FinanceGilded AgeRobber BaronsDonationsPolitical CampaignsU SFund Raising
Author:David Axelrod
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“Leo sighed and went back to her work, but by the time she reached her little apartment on the houseboat moored to Gezira Island she was weary and on edge. She could not get the thought of Alix caught up in a battle out of her head. Sasha’s informant had described how she had been honoured by Tito for her role as a bombasi, hurling grenades into enemy bunkers. It wasn’t hard to imagine how dangerous that would be. She longed to confide in someone, to share her anxiety, but there was no one she could tell without divulging her source. She considered trying to get a phone call through to Sasha in London but dismissed the idea. It was unfair to burden him with the same worry when he was as helpless as she was. Apart from that, she was not sure how he would react. He hated the idea of women anywhere near the front line, as she knew from her own experience. In addition, Alix was fighting on the wrong side as far as he was concerned.”

RelationshipsDramaHistoricalHistorical RomanceCaptivatingWomen In HistoryGilded AgePolitical IntrigueRomance Literary Fiction
Book:A Call to Home
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“This was, after all, New Orleans in 1890- the Crescent City of the Gilded Age, where aliases of convenience and unconventional living arrangements were anything but out of the ordinary, at least in certain parts of town. Identities were fluid here, and names and appearances weren't always the best guide to telling who was who.”

American HistoryNew OrleansLouisianaGilded AgeNew Orleans French QuarterGary KristStoryville
Book:Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans
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“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.”

WorldGovernmentAgeTodayCultureSocialResponsibilityCitizensMoralityGreedShouldersCorporationsEmployeeCollectivesShedPersonal ResponsibilityIrresponsibilityGildedGilded AgeCollective Responsibility
Book:Sociopathic Society: A People's Sociology of the United States
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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.”

MeanStillsStoriesGovernmentAgeTodayPoliticalFatherIndividualSocialWealthResponsibilityRightsCenturyIdealsRootsBillsDemocraticSubstanceFoundingLicensePolitical SystemsBill Of RightsRobbersGildedGilded AgeRobber Baron
Author:Bill Moyers
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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.”

WorldStatesAgeCultureIndividualLostSocialUnitedResponsibilityUnited StatesRightsUniqueMissionsIndividualismAvariceCivicsIndividual RightsRights And FreedomsGildedGilded AgeCivic Responsibility
Author:George Hickenlooper
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