Wealth & Money Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s line lands like a polite Victorian sentence that’s secretly a shove. He lists “private parts, money, and religious opinions” with the brisk efficiency of a ledger, turning the supposedly lofty “important things” in a man’s life into three touchy zones of possession. The wit is in the ordering: start with the body (the primal), move to cash (the social), end with belief (the sanctified) and let the reader notice how easily the sacred can behave like property.

The subtext is less “men are crude” than “men are guarded.” Each item is something you defend reflexively: sexuality because it’s bound up with shame, status, and lineage; money because it’s power rendered portable; religion because it offers moral cover while demanding tribal loyalty. Butler’s joke is that these aren’t merely valued - they’re policed. They’re the subjects that trigger instant outrage, secrecy, or violence when questioned. He’s pointing at the emotional infrastructure behind respectability: a culture that insists on decorum while organizing male identity around control, entitlement, and unexamined certainties.

Context matters. Butler wrote against the grain of earnest Victorian piety, skeptical of institutional religion and alert to how “principle” can mask self-interest. The line reads like a small scandal delivered in a dinner jacket: it collapses the distance between the pulpit and the pocket, between moral fervor and bodily anxiety. It works because it doesn’t argue; it categorizes. The reader does the uncomfortable math and recognizes the type of man - and the society - Butler is skewering.