"If a man has money, it is usually a sign, too, that he knows how to take care of it; don't imagine his money is easy to get simply because he has plenty of it"
About this Quote
Money, in Howe's framing, isn't just a pile of cash; it's a credential. The line flatters wealth as evidence of competence, turning fortune into a moral résumé: if he has it, he must "know how to take care of it". That small pivot does big cultural work. It pushes back against the comforting myth that the rich are rich by accident, or that their resources are just sitting there waiting to be skimmed by the clever or the desperate. Howe is warning you not to confuse abundance with vulnerability.
The subtext is a defense of property disguised as practical advice. "Don't imagine his money is easy to get" reads like street-level realism, but it also naturalizes inequality. It implies that wealth is self-protecting because the wealthy are inherently disciplined, shrewd, maybe even tougher than the people eyeing their pockets. The sentence quietly shifts attention away from structures - inheritance, access, labor exploitation, monopoly - and onto personal virtue: the rich have money because they manage money.
Howe, a late 19th-century American writer-journalist, was steeped in a culture that prized self-making and treated financial success as character proof. This is Gilded Age common sense: admire the winners, distrust the idea of redistribution, and assume the marketplace is a merit filter. The quote works because it sounds like a warning about tactics, when it's really a story about legitimacy.
The subtext is a defense of property disguised as practical advice. "Don't imagine his money is easy to get" reads like street-level realism, but it also naturalizes inequality. It implies that wealth is self-protecting because the wealthy are inherently disciplined, shrewd, maybe even tougher than the people eyeing their pockets. The sentence quietly shifts attention away from structures - inheritance, access, labor exploitation, monopoly - and onto personal virtue: the rich have money because they manage money.
Howe, a late 19th-century American writer-journalist, was steeped in a culture that prized self-making and treated financial success as character proof. This is Gilded Age common sense: admire the winners, distrust the idea of redistribution, and assume the marketplace is a merit filter. The quote works because it sounds like a warning about tactics, when it's really a story about legitimacy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wealth |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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