Wealth & Money Quote by Antoine Rivarol

Wealth, Rivarol suggests, is less a trophy than a trapdoor: for certain temperaments, money doesn’t purchase ease, it buys a new species of anxiety. The line works because it refuses the comforting myth that material success naturally equals security. Instead, it sketches a psychological promotion no one brags about: the richer you get, the more your imagination becomes an accountant for catastrophe.

Rivarol’s phrasing is surgical. “The only thing” is a deliberately cruel narrowing, the kind of absolutism that forces a reader to feel the compression of a life reorganized around preservation. “For some people” keeps it from being a moralistic swipe at all wealth; he’s targeting a type - the acquisitive mind that can’t metabolize abundance into freedom. That qualifier also makes the barb sharper, because it implies the failure isn’t in money itself but in the person’s relationship to it: wealth reveals character the way pressure reveals faults in metal.

The context is late-18th-century France, where status, property, and patronage were both the engine of social mobility and the fuse of social resentment. In a society about to discover how quickly fortunes can be liquidated by politics, the fear of loss isn’t neurotic; it’s rational. The subtext is almost diagnostic: wealth can intensify dependency on the very structures that made it possible, turning “having” into “guarding.” Rivarol, the journalist as ironist, aims his wit at the bourgeois fantasy that money ends uncertainty - it often just upgrades it.