Wealth & Money Quote by Oliver Goldsmith

A neat little couplet of social rot disguised as a proverb, Goldsmiths line lands because it treats wealth not as a reward but as a solvent. Accumulation sounds orderly, even virtuous: the careful stacking of value over time. Decay is biological, inevitable, ugly. Put them in the same sentence and the moral story of prosperity flips into something closer to a crime scene.

Goldsmith is writing in an 18th-century Britain remade by enclosure, colonial trade, and early industrial capitalism. The countryside is being reorganized for efficiency and profit, and the human cost is being politely edited out of the ledger. His intent isnt anti-money in the abstract; its a warning about concentration. Wealth that accumulates implies wealth that stops circulating. It pools. It hardens into estates, rents, patronage, and political influence. And when it hardens, it doesnt just create poverty elsewhere; it creates a particular kind of person at the top.

The subtext is sharper: decay is happening on both ends. The poor are degraded by displacement and scarcity, but the rich are also corroded by insulation. When everything is purchasable, character becomes optional. Sympathy atrophies. Public duty turns into a hobby. Goldsmith, a poet of manners with a moralists eye, understands that inequality isnt only an economic arrangement; its a cultural technology that trains everyone in different forms of diminishment.

The line works because it refuses the comforting idea that the system can stay clean while only outcomes get messy. Accumulation isnt a side effect. Its the mechanism.