Wealth & Money Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler pulls off a neat Victorian judo move: he grants the familiar moral slogan its authority, then flips it to show the underside of respectable virtue. “The love of money” is the biblical, safe target - greed as a personal vice. But Butler’s follow-up, “The want of money is so quite as truly,” drags the problem out of the soul and into the street. Evil doesn’t only seep from excess; it erupts from deprivation. That pivot is the engine of the line: a dead-serious proverb becomes a social indictment with a single grammatical twist.

The subtext is impatience with moralists who treat poverty as character-building or spiritually clarifying. Butler suggests that lack of money produces its own distortions: desperation, humiliation, compromised choices, the small daily violences of being excluded from security. It’s not a defense of greed so much as a refusal to let the comfortable monopolize the language of ethics. If you’ve never had to “want,” you can afford to sermonize about “love.”

Context matters. Butler writes in a 19th-century Britain swollen with industrial wealth and sharpened inequality, when philanthropy and piety often masked a system that required the poor to be disciplined, not helped. The line’s wit is barbed: it uses the cadence of moral instruction to expose moral instruction as insufficient. In Butler’s hands, money isn’t just temptation; it’s infrastructure. And when the infrastructure is missing, so is the pretense that evil is merely a private failing.