Wealth & Money Quote by W. C. Fields

Fields’s line lands like a barbed one-liner, but it’s really a small bomb under the American fairy tale that money changes your nature. “Nothing but” is the knife: it strips wealth of its usual metaphysical glow and reduces it to an accessory, not an upgrade. The joke isn’t that rich people are secretly miserable; it’s that we keep expecting cash to perform a moral or psychological miracle it can’t deliver. A “poor man with money” still carries the same appetites, anxieties, grudges, and bad habits. The bank balance changes the scale, not the script.

The subtext is pure Fields: suspicion of uplift, contempt for respectable pretenses, and a refusal to flatter the audience’s aspirations. Fields made a career out of playing the con, the drunk, the perennial screw-up - characters who understand that society’s “success” language is often just varnish. In that world, wealth doesn’t confer virtue; it simply buys better hiding places and more elaborate alibis. If you’re petty, you can now be petty with a yacht. If you’re lonely, you can be lonely in a larger house.

Context matters: Fields worked in the shadow of the Gilded Age hangover and the Great Depression, when fortunes could look both obscene and fragile. The line reads as a populist wink and a cynical diagnosis at once: the rich aren’t a different species, and that’s exactly the problem. It punctures envy while also puncturing reverence, leaving you with a more unsettling thought - if money doesn’t transform people, then the systems built around money won’t either.