Wealth & Money Quote by Peter Cooper

Cooper’s line reads like a Victorian-era firewall between capitalism and conscience: make money, but keep it “honorable”; live, but make it “good.” The genius is in the quiet admission that these goals don’t automatically overlap. “Always recognized” is doing heavy lifting - a defensive phrase that implies he’s heard the opposite assumption plenty: that business exists to extract, to win, to take what the market will bear. By naming honor as a condition, he’s acknowledging the moral suspicion attached to commerce in an industrializing America, then insisting it doesn’t have to be earned by renouncing profit.

The second sentence widens the frame and subtly demotes money from ultimate aim to instrument. “Endeavored to remember” is more candid than it looks: memory fails under pressure, and Cooper is describing a discipline, not a natural virtue. In the 19th-century world he helped build - railroads, telegraphy, factories - business wasn’t an abstract “economy” but a set of choices that could disfigure cities, bodies, and politics. The subtext is that modern wealth creates modern temptations: scale makes it easier to hide harm behind payrolls and innovation narratives.

Cooper’s intent lands as a personal credo and a public rebuke. As an inventor-industrialist who later funded education (notably Cooper Union), he’s offering a model of legitimacy: profit can be clean, but it’s not enough; the life behind the balance sheet has to cash out in public benefit. It’s an early statement of what we’d now call “stakeholders,” minus the branding.