Machiavelli on our financial elites

…one sees that great men are always the same in every fortune; and if it varies — now by exalting them, now by crushing them — they do not vary but always keep their spirit firm and joined with their mode of life so that one easily knows for each that fortune does not have power over them. Weak men govern themselves otherwise, because they grow vain and intoxicated in good fortune by attributing all the good they have to the virtue they have never known. Hence it arises that they become unendurable and hateful to all those whom they have around them. On that depends the sudden variation of fate; as they see it in the face, they fall suddenly into the other defect and become cowardly and abject.

–Discourses on Livy , Book III, Chapter 31