Wealth & Money Quote by Saul Bellow

Bellow’s barb lands because it punctures one of liberal modernity’s favorite comforts: the belief that naming a problem is halfway to solving it. “Identification” carries the sheen of rational progress - diagnosis, exposure, the investigative report, the therapy session, the teach-in. But Bellow insists on a colder reality: some evils are not sustained by ignorance. They’re sustained by appetite, by structure, by the quiet bargains people make with themselves.

The ellipsis is doing sly work. It mimics a mind reaching for examples and then, almost casually, drops two that are so normalized they barely register as “evil” at all. Money: not greed in the abstract, but the system that converts human life into units, incentives, status, leverage. War: not a moral aberration but a recurring instrument - economic engine, political pressure valve, identity forge. By pairing them, Bellow suggests a shared durability: both are self-reinforcing, both recruit defenders across class and ideology, both can be publicly condemned while privately depended upon.

The subtext is an accusation against the sentimental idea that awareness equals virtue. You can know exactly what money does to a soul and still want its protections. You can understand war’s horror and still accept its supposed necessity. That’s Bellow’s novelist’s pessimism: the human animal is capable of lucidity without conversion.

Context matters. Writing in the long shadow of World War II and the Cold War, Bellow watched “never again” become a slogan that history kept embarrassing. His line reads like a warning to intellectuals and reformers: moral clarity is not power. Some evils survive exposure because they’re not hiding. They’re home.