Wealth & Money Quote by Ben Hecht

Hecht’s line is a neat piece of social x-ray: it treats bragging and pleading as the same performance, just staged with different props. The rich man “showing” wealth isn’t sharing information; he’s soliciting a reaction. And the reaction he wants isn’t admiration so much as proof of hierarchy - envy as tribute. Hecht turns envy into currency, a kind of emotional tithe paid to status.

Then he flips the script on the poor man. Poverty, displayed, can become a moral demand: “the alms of my guilt.” Not compassion, not solidarity - guilt, that sticky self-focused feeling that keeps the giver central. In Hecht’s view, both transactions are less about need than about power: who gets to set the terms of the encounter, who gets to walk away feeling enlarged.

The subtext is pointedly unsentimental. Hecht isn’t denying real suffering or real inequality; he’s suspicious of the ways those realities get aestheticized and weaponized in everyday life. “Shows me” is doing a lot of work: it implies a deliberate presentation, a curated scene. In the early 20th-century urban world Hecht knew - newspapers, nightlife, hustlers, patrons, immigrants, tycoons - display was a survival skill and a con. His cynicism has bite because it refuses to flatter the audience: if you’re being asked to envy or to feel guilty, you’re being recruited. The quote’s sting is its accusation that our reactions are often the very thing being bought.