“They who are of opinion that Money will do every thing, may very well be suspected to do every thing for Money.”
— George Savile, 1st Marquis of Halifax, Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections (posthumously published, 1750)
I dismissed this quote for years. Honestly, it sounded like something a wealthy uncle stitches onto a throw pillow — wise-sounding but ultimately toothless. Then a colleague forwarded it to me during a particularly brutal stretch at work, when our team had watched a promising project get gutted because someone upstream decided the budget mattered more than the outcome. She sent it with zero context, just the quote in a plain text email at 11:47 on a Tuesday night. I read it twice, then a third time. Suddenly, the rhetorical flip at the center of it landed like a quiet punch — the idea that your beliefs about money reveal your willingness to be bought. That night, the quote stopped being a platitude and started feeling like a diagnosis. It sent me down a rabbit hole about where it actually came from, and what I found surprised me completely.
The Quote and Its Deceptive Simplicity
Before diving into history, it helps to sit with the structure of this saying. The quote operates as a rhetorical chiasm — a device where a phrase reverses its own terms to create a new, sharper meaning. The first clause states a belief: money can do everything. The second clause turns that belief back on the believer: therefore, you would do everything for money. The logic is elegant and quietly devastating. It does not accuse. Instead, it simply draws a straight line between a worldview and a character. That line, once drawn, is hard to unsee.
This structure — permuting the same words to expose a moral implication — gives the quote its staying power. Additionally, it works across centuries because human nature has not changed much. The tension between valuing money and being corrupted by that valuation remains as alive today as it was in seventeenth-century England.
The Earliest Known Source: George Savile’s Manuscript
The trail leads back to one of the more fascinating figures in English political history. George Savile, 1st Marquis of Halifax, lived from 1633 to 1695. He was a statesman, essayist, and political philosopher known for his moderate, pragmatic positions during an era of intense religious and political conflict. His contemporaries nicknamed him “The Trimmer” because he refused to align rigidly with any faction.
Savile wrote prolifically, but much of his work circulated privately during his lifetime. After his death in 1695, his manuscripts passed through family hands. His granddaughter Dorothy, Countess of Burlington, held the original documents. Then, in 1750 — a full fifty-five years after Savile died — a volume appeared in London under the title A Character of King Charles the Second: And Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections. Publishers J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper brought it out. Inside, a section titled “Of Money” contained the saying we now trace:
“They who are of opinion that Money will do every thing, may very well be suspected to do every thing for Money.”
This 1750 publication represents the earliest documented appearance of this quote in print. Notably, Savile had composed these thoughts before 1695, meaning the idea itself predates its publication by more than half a century.
Immediate Circulation: The Monthly Review of 1750
The quote did not sit quietly in Savile’s posthumous volume. Within weeks of publication, The Monthly Review — one of England’s earliest literary journals — examined the book in its May 1750 issue. The review reprinted several passages from Savile’s “Thoughts and Reflections,” including the money saying. This gave the quote a second, broader audience almost immediately. Literary journals of this era functioned much like today’s social media shares — they amplified ideas beyond the original readership of a single volume. As a result, Savile’s observation about money and character began circulating among educated English readers in 1750 with real momentum.
This early circulation matters for understanding what happened next. When a young colonial printer and philosopher in Philadelphia began compiling wisdom for his popular almanac, the saying was already in the air.
Benjamin Franklin Picks It Up
At the end of 1752, Benjamin Franklin published Poor Richard Improved: Being an Almanack and Ephemeris of the Motions of the Sun and Moon for the Year of Our Lord 1753. Tucked into the data for the month of July, readers found this:
“He that is of Opinion Money will do every Thing, may well be suspected of doing every Thing for Money.”
Franklin shifted the phrasing slightly. He moved from the plural “they who” to the singular “he that,” which gave the saying a more direct, personal accusation. Otherwise, the logic and structure remain Savile’s. Franklin was a brilliant curator of wisdom as much as an originator. He read widely, absorbed prodigiously, and redistributed ideas through the most popular publication in the colonies.
This is not plagiarism by eighteenth-century standards. Attribution norms of that era differed fundamentally from modern expectations. Franklin’s almanac served as a practical tool — farmers, merchants, and tradespeople used it for weather predictions and planting schedules. The aphorisms scattered through its pages were bonuses, not the main event. Still, because Franklin’s almanac reached tens of thousands of colonial readers annually, his version of the saying spread far more widely than Savile’s original.
How the Misattribution to Franklin Took Hold
Here is where the history gets genuinely interesting. Because Franklin’s version appeared in his enormously popular almanac, later generations naturally assumed he had coined it. By 1890, a newspaper in Sandusky, Ohio printed the saying and attributed it directly to “Poor Richard” — Franklin’s almanac persona. This attribution stuck. Moreover, in 1942, the influential scholar H. L. Mencken included the saying in his A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources, listing it under Benjamin Franklin with the specific citation of Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1753.
Mencken’s dictionary carried enormous authority. Researchers and writers cited it for decades. Consequently, the Franklin attribution embedded itself deeply into popular culture. However, the chronological record tells a different story. Franklin published his version in 1752 (for the 1753 almanac), but Savile’s posthumous collection appeared in 1750. Furthermore, Savile almost certainly wrote the original before his death in 1695. The math clearly favors Savile as the originator.
Variations Across the Decades
As the saying traveled through print culture, editors and compilers adjusted its wording repeatedly. Each version preserved the core chiastic logic while shifting pronouns, prepositions, or emphasis. Consider this 1847 version from the Sunbury American of Sunbury, Pennsylvania:
“Those who are of opinion that money will do everything, may be reasonably suspected of doing everything for money.”
This version replaced “very well” with “reasonably” — a subtler, more lawyerly qualifier. Two years later, in 1849, The Ohio Cultivator — a semi-monthly agricultural journal based in Columbus — printed essentially the same phrasing again, also without naming any source. These mid-nineteenth-century appearances suggest the saying had fully entered the anonymous wisdom tradition by then, floating free of any specific author.
This pattern — a saying detaching from its origin and entering the common pool of “things people say” — is extremely common with aphorisms. The quote’s structure made it especially prone to this fate. Because it sounds like timeless folk wisdom rather than a specific intellectual argument, readers absorbed it as general truth rather than a named thinker’s observation.
George Savile: The Man Behind the Words
Understanding Savile helps explain why this saying carries such unusual moral precision. He was not a detached philosopher. He navigated the most treacherous political waters of seventeenth-century England — the Restoration of Charles II, the reign of James II, and the lead-up to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He watched powerful men compromise their principles for advancement. He observed courtiers, ministers, and merchants bend their convictions to the shape of whoever held the purse strings.
Savile’s “Thoughts and Reflections” reads less like abstract moralizing and more like field notes from a long career in a deeply corrupt environment. His observations about money sit alongside sharp remarks about flattery, ambition, and the self-deceptions of powerful people. For example, the same section that contains our quote also includes:
“If Men considered how many Things there are that Riches cannot buy, they would not be so fond of them.”
This context matters enormously. Savile was not warning against poverty or celebrating frugality. Instead, he was making a psychological point about how beliefs reveal character. Additionally, his broader body of work consistently returns to the theme of intellectual honesty — the gap between what people claim to believe and what their actions actually demonstrate.
The Rhetorical Mechanics: Why This Quote Works
Let’s spend a moment on structure, because the quote’s durability comes directly from its design. Source The rhetorical device at work here is sometimes called antimetabole — a specific form of chiasmus where the same words repeat in reverse order to create contrast or irony. Famous examples include John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
Savile’s version works differently, though. Kennedy’s reversal is inspirational — it asks you to change your behavior. Savile’s reversal is diagnostic — it reveals that your behavior has already been determined by your belief. The first clause describes a worldview. The second clause describes the person who holds it. Therefore, the quote does not ask you to change anything. It simply holds up a mirror.
This is why the saying feels so uncomfortable. It does not moralize loudly. Instead, it quietly implies that certain beliefs are not neutral intellectual positions — they are confessions.
Modern Usage and Continuing Relevance
Today, the saying appears most frequently in discussions of corporate ethics, political corruption, and financial decision-making. Source Writers and commentators invoke it when examining situations where financial incentives seem to drive decisions that should rest on other values — medical research funding, journalism, public policy, and legal practice all generate regular examples.
Social media has given the quote new circulation, though usually without any attribution at all. It appears in business leadership threads, personal finance discussions, and political commentary. Sometimes Franklin gets the credit. Sometimes the quote floats completely free of any name. Occasionally, someone correctly identifies Savile — though this remains the minority case.
The Franklin misattribution persists partly because his name carries more popular recognition than Savile’s. Additionally, the almanac context feels right — Franklin’s Poor Richard persona was famous for pithy financial wisdom, so the saying fits the brand. However, fitting a brand is not the same as originating an idea.
Setting the Record Straight
The documented evidence points clearly in one direction. Source George Savile, 1st Marquis of Halifax, deserves credit for this saying. His 1750 posthumous publication provides the earliest known printed source. Given that Savile died in 1695, he almost certainly composed the thought sometime in the late seventeenth century — making the idea potentially more than 300 years old.
Franklin’s contribution was amplification, not authorship. He took a saying from a recently published English collection and introduced it to colonial American readers through the most widely distributed publication in North America at the time. That act of transmission had enormous cultural consequences. However, transmission is different from creation.
Mencken’s 1942 attribution to Franklin — though understandable given the information available at the time — sent researchers and writers down the wrong path for decades. Correcting the record matters not just for historical accuracy, but because Savile himself deserves recognition as one of the sharper moral observers of his era.
Why It Still Lands
Three centuries after Savile likely wrote it, the saying retains its edge because the underlying psychology has not changed. People who believe money solves every problem tend to treat every problem as something money can solve — including problems that are fundamentally ethical. Furthermore, once you accept that framing, the temptation to solve your own problems by acquiring more money becomes nearly irresistible. The belief and the behavior feed each other.
Savile saw this dynamic clearly in the court of Charles II. We see it in boardrooms, legislatures, and newsrooms today. The specific setting changes. The mechanism stays the same.
That is the mark of a genuinely durable observation — not that it sounds wise, but that it keeps being true. My colleague who forwarded it at 11:47 on a Tuesday night understood this intuitively, even without knowing it came from a seventeenth-century English nobleman rather than a colonial American printer. The source matters for historical accuracy. However, the insight belongs to anyone willing to sit with it long enough to feel its quiet, uncomfortable logic.
George Savile wrote it. Benjamin Franklin spread it. And somehow, across three centuries of misattribution and variation, it has kept arriving in people’s inboxes at exactly the right moment.