Wealth & Money Quote by Martin Amis

Amis lands the line with the cool brutality of a joke that refuses to be just a joke. By yoking weapons to money, he drags two sacred cows of modern life into the same fluorescent light: both are sold as instruments of security, both metastasize into identity, and both obey a logic that is less rational than addictive. The kicker is “enough,” a word that should be simple arithmetic but becomes, in his framing, a psychological impossibility. If you can’t define sufficiency, you can’t ever stop.

The subtext is about appetite disguised as prudence. People don’t stockpile arms (or cash) because they’ve calmly assessed risk; they do it because accumulation feels like control. Amis’s comparison also needles the moral alibis we grant each domain. Money is “neutral,” weapons are “necessary,” and the culture lets both claims slide because they’re profitable and comforting. His line suggests they’re twin faiths: markets and militarism, each promising safety while quietly expanding the perimeter of fear.

Contextually, it reads as late-20th/early-21st-century Amis: a novelist of escalation, of societies that confuse more with better and power with purpose. Post-Cold War abundance didn’t tame the arsenal; it professionalized and globalized it. The sentence is built like a verdict, not an argument: short, aphoristic, and cynical enough to implicate everyone from states to collectors. “No one knows” spreads the blame democratically, a bleak little chorus of complicity.