Wealth & Money Quote by Peter De Vries

De Vries lands the punch with a straight-faced tweak of Fitzgerald: the rich aren’t “different” in some poetic, anthropological way; they’re different because the system treats them differently. By swapping romance for accounting, he converts class mystique into a line item. The joke works because it refuses the usual consolations about wealth being talent, taste, or destiny. It’s just policy, paperwork, and power.

The specific intent is satirical deflation. De Vries punctures the cultural habit of treating the wealthy as an exotic species, then pins their advantage to something grimly procedural: taxes. The phrasing mimics everyday complaint - plain, almost tossed off - which makes the accusation feel like common sense rather than ideology. That casualness is the blade. He’s saying: if you want to understand inequality, stop staring at yachts and start reading the tax code.

Subtext: resentment isn’t merely envy; it’s about asymmetric obligation. “Pay less” implies not just lower rates but better lawyers, loopholes engineered into legislation, capital gains favored over wages, and the quiet influence that ensures the rules keep reproducing themselves. It’s also an indictment of civic mythology. We like to imagine a shared burden funding a shared society; De Vries suggests the burden is negotiable if you’re rich enough.

Context matters: mid-century American prosperity sold itself as broadly distributed, while the mechanics of tax avoidance, corporate privilege, and political access were already entrenched. De Vries, a novelist with a comedian’s timing, compresses a structural critique into nine words - and makes it sting by sounding like dinner-table banter.