Wealth & Money Quote by Margot Kidder

Kidder’s line lands like a fond snapshot that’s also a quiet indictment: youth isn’t just idealistic, it’s self-flattering. “Sweet, lovely people” is doing double work. It’s tender toward the younger self, but it also hints at the naivete of believing moral purity is enough to reorganize the world. The phrase “throw out all the staid institutions” carries the backstage energy of the late-60s/70s counterculture, when the dream wasn’t a policy tweak but a clean break: toppling the old guard, remaking society from scratch.

Then she sharpens the target: institutions that “placed money and wars above all else.” That pairing isn’t accidental. It’s a shorthand for how power reproduces itself - capital and conflict as mutually reinforcing engines. Kidder doesn’t romanticize rebellion so much as locate its original clarity: young people often see the system’s incentives with brutal accuracy, even if their strategy is pure wish.

The final turn, “When you’re young you think that’s how life works,” reads like an ache disguised as wisdom. It’s not just nostalgia; it’s the recognition that the world trains you to negotiate with what you once wanted to abolish. Coming from an actress - someone who moved through Hollywood’s own machinery of money, image, and hierarchy - the subtext is personal. She’s admitting the seduction of radical simplicity, and the slow, compromising education of adulthood, without mocking the impulse that started it.