A society that does not correctly interpret and appreciate its past cannot understand its present fortunes and adversities and can be caught unawares in a fast changing world.
Ibrahim Babangida

Fortunes are made, and disappear, over the lifetime of a single generation. Today, a person in essence takes his wealth from society just for the duration of his or her lifetime. The next generation has to create it anew.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Fortunes made in no time are like shirts made in no time; it's ten to one if they hang long together.
Douglas William Jerrold

Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I now proceed to demonstrate that the Mexicans are wholly incapable of self-government, and that our liberties, our fortunes and our lives are insecure so long as we are connected with them.
William H. Wharton

I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.
Peter Matthiessen

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.
Napoleon Hill

In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.
Eric S. Raymond

Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor.
John Ruskin

Many have been ruined by their fortunes, and many have escaped ruin by the want of fortune. To obtain it the great have become little, and the little great.
Johann Georg Zimmermann

Men's fortunes are on a wheel, which in its turning suffers not the same man to prosper for ever.
Herodotus

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.
Walt Disney

Mind your speech a little lest you should mar your fortunes.
William Shakespeare

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

My pride fell with my fortunes.
William Shakespeare

My submission to you is we're fighting the war on terror not overseas but in our own streets, and we'd be spending vast more fortunes to try to be a defensive country to protect ourselves rather than an offensive country to spread democracy wherever people yearn for it.
Johnny Isakson

Not that I am ashamed of my mind or body, my birth or breeding, my actions or fortunes, for my bashfulness is in my nature, not for any crime.
Margaret Cavendish

People don't have fortunes left them in that style nowadays; men have to work and women to marry for money. It's a dreadfully unjust world.
Louisa May Alcott

President Bush will come here and there will be new "friends" of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who "liberated" them.
Robert Fisk

Seek not to know what must not be reveal, for joy only flows where fate is most concealed. A busy person would find their sorrows much more; if future fortunes were known before!
John Dryden