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About this quote

What does it mean?
The speaker links personal moral potential to financial independence.
In plain terms
Money might make it easier to be good.
What can you take from it?
Financial security can enable moral behavior.

Where it applies

  • financial stress
  • moral decisions
  • social commentary

Putting it to work

  • seeking financial stability
  • recognizing economic bias

Questions to consider

  • Does wealth make it easier to be virtuous?

Another view

It implies moral goodness is bought rather than chosen.

More from William Makepeace Thackeray

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  3. Everybody in Vanity Fair must have remarked how well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt; how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and eas…

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