Success Quote by J. P. Morgan

Money talks here, but it does so in a deliberately exclusionary dialect. Morgan's line isn't advice about budgeting; it's a social sorting mechanism disguised as a witticism. The surface claim is simple: true luxury is beyond price sensitivity. The subtext is sharper: the very act of asking is evidence that you don't belong in the room where this purchase makes sense. It's not that you lack cash in your pocket; it's that you lack the posture of effortless expenditure that old money treats as proof of legitimacy.

Coming from J. P. Morgan, the intent lands with industrial-age force. This is Gilded Age finance speaking at the height of American wealth consolidation, when the titans of banking and railroads were inventing modern capitalism and the etiquette that laundered it into "taste". The quote functions like a velvet rope: it turns consumption into a test of class literacy. Asking the price marks you as transactional, anxious, newly arrived. Not asking signals you can treat money as atmosphere rather than instrument.

It also quietly shifts power. The seller gets to set terms without negotiation; the buyer, if they want status, must play along. That's why the line persists: it captures how luxury markets still monetize insecurity by pretending it's refinement. Morgan's genius, and its cynicism, is making exclusion sound like natural law.