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

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

topic: Responsibility, Government, Greed, Irresponsibility, Collective Responsibility

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

topic: Responsibility, Unique, Rights, Civic Responsibility, Gilded

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

- Mark Twain

topic: Inspirational, Funny, Motivational, Humorous Birthday, Staying Young

[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

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

topic: Country, Government, Law, Gilded Age

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

- Jaron Lanier

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

topic: Average, People, Economy, Gilded Age

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

- Mark Twain

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

topic: Humor, Years, Two, Golden Age, Mutual Trust

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

- Chester A. Arthur

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

topic: Freedom, Patriotic, Men, Presidents Day, Gilded Age

The free man cannot be long an ignorant man.

- William McKinley

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

topic: Men, Long, Ignorant, Gilded Age

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

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

topic: Father, Mean, Responsibility, Robber Baron, Gilded Age

Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese. Age is strictly a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

- Jack Benny

topic: Mind, Age, Matter, Humorous Birthday, Staying Young

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

topic: Years, Greed, Age, Gilded, Gilded Age

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

topic: Men, Challenges, Age, Theodore, Gilded

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

- Douglas Wilder

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

topic: America, Age, Sept 11, Gilded, Gilded Age