Wealth & Money Quote by John Dos Passos

Dos Passos writes like a man watching the price tags swing wildly in a rigged market. The blunt repetition of "cheap" lands as accusation: in a society organized around profit, even the grandest human claims get marked down. He’s not offering a romantic hot take so much as an autopsy of value. Love can be "bought" because modern life trains people to confuse affection with transaction: attention purchased with dinners, security rented through marriage, tenderness outsourced to whatever soothing commodity is on hand. The point isn’t that love is worthless; it’s that capitalism has gotten so good at packaging need that the counterfeit circulates easily.

"Lives are cheap" sharpens the critique into something political. Dos Passos came up through the machinery of the early 20th century: industrial labor, war, boom-and-bust economics, the bureaucratic churn that turns bodies into inputs. When he pairs that line with "money that's dear", he’s sketching an inverted morality where scarcity is manufactured. Human life is plentiful and replaceable to systems that can always hire another worker or draft another soldier. Money, meanwhile, is treated as the scarce, sacred substance people sacrifice time, sleep, and conscience to obtain.

The final sentence is the quiet horror: the real cost isn’t the wage, it’s the mental occupation. "Work days and sit up nights" captures how capital colonizes interior life, turning thought itself into a side hustle. Dos Passos’ cynicism isn’t posturing; it’s reportage from a culture that makes people barter their humanity for the one thing everyone agrees is "dear."