Inheritance Quotes

I was born into it and there was nothing I could do about it. It was there, like air or food, or any other element. The only question with wealth is what you do with it.

The advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with the heir.

I don't really think that, as a society, we [americans] want to confer blessings on generation after generation who contribute nothing to society, simply because somebody in the far distant past happened to amass a great sum of wealth.

Enjoy what thou has inherited from thy sires if thou wouldn't really possess it. What we employ and use is never an oppressive burden; what the moment brings forth, that only can it profit by.

When you have a fortune that is almost hard to imagine, the best thing is not to pass that on to one's children. That distorts their life situation.

That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it.

One of my favourite quotations is: 'That which thy father bequeathed thee, earn it anew, if thou wouldst possess it.'

What lawsuits grow out of the graves of rich men, every day; sowing perjury, hatred, and lies among near kindred, where there should be nothing but love!

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

I give unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture.

I realized about 10 years ago that my wealth has to go back to society. A fortune, the size of which is hard to imagine, is best not passed on to one's children. It's not constructive for them.

It is that fery person for all the orld, as just as you will desire; and seven hundred pounds of moneys, and gold, and silver, is her grandsire upon his death's-bed-Got deliver to a joyful resurrections!

If you're extremely rich, and you have got children, my theory was, you give them enough so they can do anything, but not enough so they can do nothing.

To inherit property is not to be born - it is to be still-born, rather.

A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?

They have passed the big inheritance tax, and that gets you when you are gone. You used to could die and be able to beat taxes, but not now. The undertaker don't go over your body as carefully as the assessor does your accumilated assets, and he gets his before the undertaker. They have it on these big fortunes now where they pay as high as 60 to 70 percent of what they leave. That's mighty expensive dying when it runs into money like that, and you won't see 'em dropping off as casually as they have been.

I don't see why a man shouldn't pay an inheritance tax. If a Country is good enough to pay taxes to while you are living, it's good enough to pay in after you die. By the time you die you should be so used to paying taxes that it would just be almost second nature to you.

Man's unconscious... contains all the patterns of life and behaviour inherited from his ancestors, so that every human child, prior to consciousness, is possessed of a potential system of adapted psychic functioning.

I have drifted away from thinking about these philanthropic things. And it was only as the wealth got large enough and Melinda and I had talked about the view that wealth wasn't something that would be good to just pass to the children.

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.