Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Fielding

Money doesn’t just tempt; it testifies. Fielding’s line snaps at the tidy moral fable that cash is simply the cause of corruption. Calling money “the fruit of evil, as often as the root of it” flips the usual sermon: wealth can be both the seed that grows wrongdoing and the harvest that proves it already happened.

The brilliance is in the agricultural metaphor’s timing. Roots are hidden, slow, subterranean; fruit is visible, ripe, meant to be displayed. Fielding is pointing to a social reality his readers would recognize: money often arrives after the sin, not before it. Bribes, plunder, inherited fortunes built on exploitation, court patronage, speculative bubbles, colonial extraction - the eighteenth-century economy offered plenty of ways for vice to crystallize into coin. Money becomes evidence you can carry in your pocket, a portable receipt for what someone was willing to do.

Subtextually, he’s also taking a swing at moral panic. If you blame money as the “root,” you can pretend the problem is the object, not the people or the institutions that reward predation. Fielding insists on a more unsettling view: even when money isn’t the original motive, it’s the public-facing outcome that stabilizes evil, launders it into respectability, and turns private vice into social power.

As a novelist attuned to hypocrisy, Fielding uses a neat balance - “as often as” - to deny readers the comfort of a single villain. Money is not the devil; it’s the devil’s paperwork.