Wealth & Money Quote by Anthony Trollope

A Victorian novelist doesn’t lob a line like this by accident; Trollope is baiting the moralists. “When it comes to money nobody should give up anything” reads like a flat defense of greed, but its real target is the polite fiction that people can stay virtuous once cash is on the table. The phrasing is deliberately absolutist: nobody, anything. Trollope isn’t praising stinginess so much as stripping away the era’s favorite costume, the idea that sacrifice is a reliable social reflex rather than a curated performance.

The subtext is transactional realism. In Trollope’s world, money isn’t merely a tool; it’s the medium through which character gets tested and, often, exposed. “Give up” is the key verb: it implies loss, surrender, even martyrdom. Trollope’s cynical insight is that in economic life, people rarely volunteer for martyrdom. They negotiate, they rationalize, they call self-interest “prudence.” If someone does relinquish advantage, it’s usually because a different currency is at stake - reputation, access, family peace, romance, status.

Context matters: Trollope wrote in an England remade by bureaucracy, banking, speculation, and the expanding professional class - a society where money was newly mobile and therefore newly anxiety-producing. The old aristocratic story said wealth should come with noblesse oblige; the new capitalist story said wealth proved merit. Trollope’s line punctures both. It works because it refuses the comforting lie that financial decisions can be kept separate from human appetite. He’s reminding you that the tender sentiments people advertise are often least credible exactly where the numbers start to matter.