There should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil …

—Plato, the Laws

Great men are almost always bad men … There is no worse heresy than [to say] that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

—Lord Acton, letter to Mandell Creighton, April 5, 1887

The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will [one day] be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

—John Maynard Keynes, as quoted by Robert Skidelsky in “Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism”