Wealth & Money Quote by John Harvey Kellogg

Kellogg’s line is a neat little moral backflip: sanctify the means by baptizing the ends. It’s spoken in the upbeat, can-do register of the American businessman-philanthropist, where ethics becomes a kind of accounting problem. “The devil’s money” is a theatrical phrase that conjures vice, exploitation, or simply the profit-making world outside the churchy perimeter. Yet the punchline is permission: if cash can be rerouted into “the Lord’s work,” even borrowed, the taint is magically laundered.

The intent is pragmatic, but it’s also a self-exoneration script. Kellogg, a health reformer turned corporate force around Battle Creek, lived in the overlap between piety and enterprise. Sanitariums, publishing ventures, and food innovation didn’t run on sermons; they ran on capital. This quote provides a theology for fundraising in a capitalist ecosystem: take money from questionable sources, use financial leverage, and treat debt as a temporary moral inconvenience. The subtext is an argument for institutional survival at any cost, wrapped in righteousness.

What makes it work is its blunt refusal of purity politics before purity politics had a name. It anticipates the modern nonprofit world’s quiet bargains with donors, sponsors, and foundations: you can’t scale virtue without touching the market’s grime. The phrase “carry on the work” lands like marching orders, not reflection. Doubt is framed as dereliction; compromise becomes devotion.