Wealth & Money Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce turns the eulogy - supposedly our most reverent form of speech - into a transaction, then twists the knife with a punchline: the safest way to earn praise is to stop breathing. The line works because it treats “tribute” as less a moral duty than a social calculation. In polite society, the dead can’t contradict you, sue you, or complicate your narrative. A corpse is the perfect audience: captive, silent, and endlessly improvable.

The first half (“wealth and power”) frames public praise as upwardly directed flattery, the kind that lubricates careers and institutions. Bierce’s phrasing is stingy: “advantages” makes status sound like a rigged game, not merit. Then he adds “consideration,” a mock-courteous word that makes death sound like good manners - as if the deceased has thoughtfully removed the inconvenience of being a real person. That faux-politeness is the satire’s engine: he mimics the tone of decorum to expose how decorum often functions as camouflage for opportunism.

Context matters. Bierce, a journalist steeped in the brutality of the Civil War and the hypocrisies of Gilded Age America, wrote The Devil’s Dictionary to puncture the era’s pieties. In a culture busy sanctifying tycoons, politicians, and “great men,” he suggests eulogies are rarely about truth. They’re about managing reputations, soothing the living, and laundering the past into something presentable. The joke lands because it’s uncomfortably plausible: we often save honesty for private life and reserve public speech for the unanswerable.