Seven Great Quotes About Money

Emperor Vespasian famously said, “Money has no smell” when questioned about his decision to tax urinals. The folks here might disagree.

The love of money might be the root of all evil, but St. Paul wasn’t the first to say so. The gnome Phocylides said the same thing (“the mother of all evil”) 600 years earlier.

It’s not surprising.

Money has occupied the human consciousness since we became civilized enough to trade. Money is the thing that gives access to all other things because money is, by definition, a means of exchange: it’s the thing everyone wants because it can provide everything.

That makes money, in the words of the modern Jewish mystic Simone Weil, “power’s master key.”

So . . .

Money is power. Money is evil. Money is serious.

But like all serious things, it’s funny. If humor involves the juxtaposition of two unexpected things, one of those things needs to be serious, and something as deadly serious as money provides a lot of fodder for humor, as the poet Robert Graves (I Claudius) realized when he said,

“There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.”