"The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions"
About this Quote
Samuel Butler reduces a mans core attachments to a blunt trio: body, purse, and creed. The order is telling. Private parts signal the primal, the vulnerable center of shame, desire, and reproduction; money denotes survival and status in a commercial society; religious opinions crown identity with a moral halo that justifies everything else. Together they map the intimate, the transactional, and the transcendent. Touch any of the three and you provoke defensiveness, secrecy, and sometimes violence. They are the objects a man most hides, most counts, and most fights over.
Butler was a Victorian iconoclast known for skewering received pieties in Erewhon, The Way of All Flesh, and the Note-Books. His aphorism is not a celebration but a diagnostic jab at what men actually protect, as opposed to what they profess to value. Public rhetoric speaks of honor, duty, patriotism, or love; private behavior ring-fences sex, cash, and creed. The line also plays on the legal and social regimes that police these domains: obscenity and chastity rules for the body, taxes and contracts for money, blasphemy and heresy for belief. Where the state draws its hardest lines, people tend to locate their deepest interests.
The phrase briefly winks at the prudery it mocks. Briefs hide the body; euphemism hides the want; doctrine hides the fear. Butler treats these attachments as both universal and historically specific: a mans potency, solvency, and orthodoxy formed the Victorian measure of respectability. He implies that the sacred is often a mask for the jealously guarded. If you wish to know a mans true priorities, see what he will not let you see, what he resents paying, and what he refuses to argue about.
The provocation endures. Contemporary battles over reproductive rights, wealth inequality, and culture-war theology echo Butler’s trinity. Bodies, bank accounts, and beliefs remain the pressure points where personal identity meets social control.
Butler was a Victorian iconoclast known for skewering received pieties in Erewhon, The Way of All Flesh, and the Note-Books. His aphorism is not a celebration but a diagnostic jab at what men actually protect, as opposed to what they profess to value. Public rhetoric speaks of honor, duty, patriotism, or love; private behavior ring-fences sex, cash, and creed. The line also plays on the legal and social regimes that police these domains: obscenity and chastity rules for the body, taxes and contracts for money, blasphemy and heresy for belief. Where the state draws its hardest lines, people tend to locate their deepest interests.
The phrase briefly winks at the prudery it mocks. Briefs hide the body; euphemism hides the want; doctrine hides the fear. Butler treats these attachments as both universal and historically specific: a mans potency, solvency, and orthodoxy formed the Victorian measure of respectability. He implies that the sacred is often a mask for the jealously guarded. If you wish to know a mans true priorities, see what he will not let you see, what he resents paying, and what he refuses to argue about.
The provocation endures. Contemporary battles over reproductive rights, wealth inequality, and culture-war theology echo Butler’s trinity. Bodies, bank accounts, and beliefs remain the pressure points where personal identity meets social control.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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