Success Quote by Andrew Mellon

A dry punchline masquerading as advice, "Gentlemen prefer bonds" borrows the cadence of pop romance to sell a moral of money. Mellon is deliberately riffing on the era's most famous flirtation line, "Gentlemen prefer blondes", swapping sex appeal for coupon yield. The wit is transactional: desire is recast as prudence, and the joke lands because it pretends that etiquette and finance are the same thing.

The intent is less to be funny than to normalize a class code. "Gentlemen" doesn't mean men in general; it signals a small club of the respectable rich, people whose tastes should be taken as social law. Bonds, especially in Mellon's world of early 20th-century American capital, represent safety, predictability, and the quiet power of lending rather than building. Stocks are noisy, speculative, too democratic in their volatility. Bonds are how you stay rich without seeming hungry for more.

Subtext: real status is not earned through visible hustle but through controlled distance. You don't chase gains; you collect them. At a time when industrial fortunes were getting minted fast and markets could punish arrogance overnight, Mellon's line is an old-money move from a new-money titan: if you can frame conservative investing as "good breeding", you make risk look vulgar.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Mellon wasn't just a businessman; he was a political force and Treasury secretary who helped shape tax policy friendly to capital. The quip doubles as ideology: a world where the best people prefer the instruments that protect wealth, and where that preference is treated not as strategy but as virtue.