Word: lot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There is a legend in America that because everybody has a car and a television set, and a lot of people own houses and can afford vacations, the rich don't live so very differently from the middle class. Don't you believe it. Still, being very, very rich is not quite as much fun as it used to be. We've gradually lost the old exuberance of my parents' day. No more marble palaces or French chateaux imported stone by stone; no more parties reminiscent of the triumphal march in Aida. Instead of encouraging the peasantry to goggle enviously...
...American rich have always felt a little guilty. As David Brinkley puts it, there is "an attitude widely held in this country (but almost nowhere else) that it may not always be sinful to have a lot of money, but it is vaguely sinful to enjoy it and unforgivably sinful to do so in public." Of course, this feeling is less a matter of morality than envy. In this wonderfully egalitarian country, the have-nots naturally demand: "Why not me?" And in politics, the voters have come to accept rich candidates, if not actually to prefer them...
...enough other ventures to qualify him as a one-man conglomerate. She has five children and five establishments in Lexington, Ky., Saratoga, Manhattan, Manitoba, Canada, and 100,000 acres of the Adirondacks. So Marylou and her two secretaries (one in New York and one in Kentucky) spend a lot of time in a welter of lists, files and details. She likes to dash off notes to the help about buying ham at less than $5 a pound: As she says: "Money does not grow on trees." And then there are decisions-decisions like what movies to choose for the Adirondacks...
...Rockefeller, who has the Museum of Modern Art at his beck and call, or Paul Mellon, who has something like $1 billion to dip into. Even at that, the art is not necessarily appreciated. One of Paul's daughters brought a friend home from Foxcroft (that school demands a lot more than a "good seat" for riding these days!). Well, the friend looked at a Van Gogh and said: "Who paints in the family?" "Nobody," the Mellon girl answered. "Dad gets them at a store...
...Bank: "If you underpredict, you can always say, 'Gee, we did even better than I had predicted,' and it's not so bad. But then if you say, 'Well, we didn't do as well as I thought we would,' you look a lot worse...