Wealth & Money Quote by Ogden Nash

Nash’s joke lands because it pokes a pin in a feel-good moral people love to recite when they’re comfortably insulated from its consequences. “Money can’t buy happiness” is the classic consoling proverb, a tidy way to pretend virtue outranks cash. Nash keeps the first half - “Certainly there are things in life that money can’t buy” - then yanks the rug with a question that exposes the hidden premise: deprivation isn’t noble, it’s just inconvenient.

The line works on timing and reversal. He starts in the register of polite agreement, then swerves into a deadpan dare: go ahead, try purchasing “them” (love, respect, security, time, health, dignity - pick your abstraction) without money. The humor is that the answer is obvious, but the social script usually prevents us from saying it. Nash isn’t arguing that money buys everything; he’s arguing that money is the admission price to even attempt most of what we romanticize as “priceless.” You can’t buy love, but you can buy the room, the dinner, the childcare, the breathing space that makes love easier to sustain. You can’t buy health, but you can buy better odds.

Context matters: Nash writes in an America sliding through depression and war into consumer abundance, when middle-class optimism and advertising promised comfort as a birthright. His light verse style disguises a sharper cultural critique: the aphorisms we trade about money often function as etiquette, a way to avoid discussing inequality. The punchline is a laugh that catches in the throat because it’s true.