Life & Wisdom Quote by Zig Ziglar

Ziglar’s line is a salesman’s wink dressed up as wisdom: it pretends to demote money while quietly reinstalling it near the top of the human hierarchy. The joke does the heavy lifting. By yoking cash to oxygen, he borrows the language of survival to legitimize ambition, then softens the bluntness with a folksy “reasonably close” and the mock-scientific “gotta have it scale.” It’s humor as persuasion: laugh, nod, stop feeling guilty about wanting more.

The specific intent is classic Ziglar: reassure an audience that likely aspires to wealth but wants to remain morally intact. He offers a compromise creed: you can be values-driven and still chase income aggressively. The subtext is a critique of pious anti-materialism, not of money itself. He’s telling you that dismissing money is a luxury belief - easy to perform when your bills are paid.

Context matters. Ziglar rose with late-20th-century American self-help and motivational speaking, a world where optimism is a product and sincerity is a sales tactic. This quote fits that ecosystem: it’s a quotable, stage-ready line that disarms resistance to capitalist striving by framing it as practical necessity rather than greed. By invoking oxygen, he also collapses the messy politics of inequality into a personal-management problem: if money is air, then the ethical question becomes not “why is it scarce?” but “why aren’t you breathing harder?”