Wealth & Money Quote by Mario Puzo

Puzo’s line reads like a toast at a christening, but it carries the bruised wisdom of a novelist who made a career anatomizing families as both sanctuary and trap. “The only wealth” is an absolutist claim, the kind people reach for when they’ve seen what money does up close: it multiplies leverage, then multiplies enemies. By declaring children “more than all the money, power on earth,” Puzo isn’t being sentimental so much as issuing a value-system correction that his fiction constantly tests and often finds wanting.

The intent is to relocate the idea of legacy from the public scoreboard (cash, status, influence) to the private one (bloodline, continuity, obligation). Subtext: wealth that can be counted can also be taken. Children are the one “asset” that is simultaneously priceless and precarious - they can’t be bought without moral rot, can’t be fully controlled without violence, and can’t be protected without compromise. In Puzo’s world, that compromise is the story: men who justify brutality as “for the family,” then discover family is the thing brutality corrodes first.

Context matters because Puzo writes out of immigrant striving and mid-century American materialism, where success is loudly advertised and quietly lonely. The quote plays like a counterspell against the American dream’s hollowing effect. It also doubles as a warning: if children are the only real wealth, then every decision that risks them - greed, revenge, ambition - is not just a sin, it’s bad business.