I spent a lot of money on booze, birds, and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.

During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.

You know you're getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.

The public exactions and expenditure have much to do with poverty. To raise not less than eighty millions sterling per annum for purposes of government, to expend thirty millions of it in military preparations and means of offence and defence, the bulk of which is only rendered apparently necessary by a mistaken foreign policy, must act as a burden on the people, and must press multitudes of prudent and virtuous families to poverty.

We need a radical reappraisal of public finance in Nigeria. We spend money without thinking. We have carried on for too long thinking more about how to spend money, reflecting less on how to raise revenue — largely because of the seasonal oil windfalls. A modern state cannot build its finances on oil windfalls and hand-outs. The revenue base must be well established, reliable and predictable.

Energy wasted on negative ends.

Caina attende chi a vita ci spense

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto V, 106-108

I had hoped for something much better... [T]he poor in this country have not benefited at all from the ANC. This government spends "like a drunken sailor". Instead of investing in projects to give people jobs, they spend millions buying weapons and private jets, and sending gifts to Haiti.

Our wasted oil unprofitably burns, Like hidden lamps in old sepulchral urns.

During the last 100 days we have seen an orgy. It would make any local smorgasbord embarrassed if you looked at this spending orgy we've seen in Washington. So it's no surprise our national debt is now soaring over $11 trillion dollars. The government spent its wad by April 26. Every dime government spends after April 26 throughout the rest of this fiscal year is borrowed money.

Expenditure rises to meet income.

I just cannot share this Gandhi outlook... If people have more money to spend they may, it is true, gamble or smoke or drink it away. But a lot of them will also enjoy nicer holidays, which is a very good thing for them. We really must keep under control, and pretty strict control, the area within which "the man in Whitehall knows best".

The extravagant expenditure of public money is an evil not to be measured by the value of that money to the people who are taxed for it.

The great countries of Europe are raising enormous revenues, and something like half of them is being spent on naval and military preparations. You may call it national insurance, that is perfectly true, but it is equally true that half the national revenue of the great countries in Europe is being spent on what is, after all, preparations to kill each other. Surely the extent to which this expenditure has grown really becomes a satire, and a reflection on civilisation. Not in our generation, perhaps, but if it goes on at the rate at which it has recently increased, sooner or later I believe it will submerge that civilisation. The burden already has shown itself in national credit—less in our national credit than in the national credit of other nations—but sooner or later, if it goes on at this rate, it must lead to national bankruptcy.