Wealth & Money Quote by Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes lands the insult with accountant precision: for the wise, words are mere counters - tokens used to keep track of reality, not reality itself. For fools, words become money: a fetish object that can be hoarded, flashed, traded, and mistaken for actual wealth. The line works because it’s less a defense of silence than an attack on verbal idolatry. Language is supposed to serve judgment; the fool lets language replace it.

The metaphor carries Hobbes’s political anxiety. Writing in a century of civil war, religious polemic, and ideological pamphleteering, he watched England’s public sphere turn into a marketplace of slogans, sacred terms, and contested definitions. In Leviathan, Hobbes treats muddled language as a direct pipeline to social disorder: when people argue over words untethered from clear meaning, they’re not just being pedantic - they’re manufacturing conflict. Calling words “money” also hints at inflation. If every faction prints its own moral currency (“liberty,” “tyranny,” “true faith”), discourse devalues into noise, and coercion rushes in to settle what reason can’t.

The subtext is an ethic of intellectual austerity. Hobbes distrusts rhetorical ornament because it flatters the speaker and seduces the audience, turning debate into performance. The “wise man” spends words the way a careful bookkeeper spends numbers: sparingly, transparently, with an eye on what’s being counted. The “fool” treats eloquence as payment in itself, as if sounding right were the same as being right.