Wealth & Money Quote by Nigel Dennis

There is a distinctly British sting in Nigel Dennis's "I hope to goodness": a half-comic prayer that doubles as a self-indictment. Dennis doesn't claim the corporate world is evil. He grants its one persuasive virtue - "the money is OK" - and then punctures it with a flat, devastating demotion: "but it is no life at all". The syntax matters. "OK" is deliberately tepid, a word you use when something is barely acceptable, not when it animates you. By refusing to call the money "good", he shrinks the supposed triumph of corporate success into mere adequacy.

The line is also a confession of fear, not just judgment. "I would not still be working" implies a past in which he did, or could have, surrendered to the safe track. It's the dread of waking up and realizing you've accidentally let inertia choose your biography. Dennis frames that as a moral and existential failure: not poverty versus wealth, but living versus merely functioning.

Contextually, coming from a mid-20th-century writer, it taps a postwar tension between stability and meaning. The corporate world offered predictability and status in an era rebuilding itself, yet Dennis hears in that predictability a kind of spiritual anesthesia. The quote works because it doesn't romanticize art either; it simply insists that a life measured mainly by paycheck is a life reduced to administration.