Wealth & Money Quote by Kin Hubbard

Hubbard’s line slices through a favorite American disguise: the claim that we’re fighting for “principle” when we’re really fighting over cash. The genius is in the folksy grammar - “a fellow,” “it ain’t” - which mimics small-town plainspokenness while setting a trap. You can almost hear the speaker puffing up with moral seriousness. Then Hubbard punctures it with the deadpan verdict: it’s the money. No sermon, no scolding, just the quick turn of the knife.

The intent is less to shame greed than to expose the performance around it. “Principle” becomes a social deodorant, a way to keep one’s self-image clean while pursuing the same material outcome. Hubbard understands that people rarely lie to others as much as they lie to themselves, and the quote’s bluntness mirrors the blunt instrument of self-deception.

Context matters: Hubbard wrote in an era of rapid commercialization, wage labor fights, and boosterish rhetoric about virtue and hard work. In that world, money wasn’t just money; it was status, security, and proof you’d “made it.” Calling it “principle” let people elevate a dispute into a moral crusade, recruiting sympathy and dodging the stigma of seeming petty.

It still lands because the mechanism hasn’t changed. We rename financial motives as “fairness,” “respect,” “policy,” “values.” Hubbard’s joke isn’t that principles are fake; it’s that they’re often drafted after the fact, hired as legal counsel for desire.