Wealth & Money Quote by Benjamin Franklin

Franklin skewers the American daydream with a single grammatical flip: ownership, that sacred proof of freedom, turns into a form of captivity. The line lands because it sounds like common sense and then quietly indicts a whole value system. “Possess” is doing double duty here. It’s the polite verb of property law, but it also echoes demonic possession, suggesting money can colonize a person’s will. You don’t just have wealth; it has you, steering your time, your anxieties, your reputation management.

The specific intent isn’t anti-commerce. Franklin was famously practical about self-improvement and industriousness; he knew capital can widen options. His target is the moral and psychological inversion that happens when accumulation becomes identity. Once the pursuit of wealth shifts from tool to telos, the rich man’s life starts to look oddly constrained: decisions filtered through risk, status, and the need to defend what’s been amassed. The subtext is that plenty can produce scarcity of another kind - leisure without ease, security without peace.

Context matters. Franklin writes from a world where a new merchant culture is swelling in the colonies, and where the rhetoric of “virtue” still competes with the rising prestige of luxury. As a politician and civic thinker, he’s warning that a republic depends on citizens capable of restraint and public-mindedness. If wealth “possesses” the people with the most influence, the public sphere gets possessed too - policy, priorities, even the definition of success bending toward preservation of property rather than cultivation of character.