Charles Darwin — "It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of mon…"
It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.
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More from Charles Darwin
"We are like a judge who has to sum up and deliver judgment, not on the evidence of witnesses, but on the arguments of counsel."
"I am not a man of much argument."
"The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed into my mind—such were our ancestors."
"The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind."
"I am almost convinced that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable."
About Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
British naturalist whose On the Origin of Species (1859) established evolution by natural selection — the unifying theory of modern biology. Closely associated with Thomas Henry Huxley (his 'bulldog' public defender) and Alfred Russel Wallace (independent co-discoverer of natural selection). For an intellectual contrast, see William Paley, Anglican theologian and Natural Theology author (1743-1805) — Origin of Species is structurally a 400-page reply to Paley — Darwin admired Paley's watchmaker-argument as an undergraduate at Cambridge and then spent 20 years building the empirical machinery to displace him. The cleanest 'design argument vs natural selection' founding rebuttal in science.
The standard scholarly entry points to Charles Darwin's work: Janet Browne (Harvard, history of science) — Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995) and The Power of Place (2002); Adrian Desmond (UCL, biographer) — Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (1991, with James Moore). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Charles Darwin.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The quote riffs on the biblical warning that loving money corrupts—then flips it. Lacking money is equally destructive. Poverty breeds desperation, limits opportunity, and strips dignity just as surely as greed distorts character. The insight is symmetric: obsession with accumulating wealth and the grinding anxiety of having none both corrode human flourishing. Material security matters; neither extreme—hoarding nor want—serves a decent human life.
Relevance to Charles Darwin
Darwin came from privileged stock—his father Robert was a wealthy physician, his wife Emma a Wedgwood heiress—granting him the financial independence to spend decades researching without a salary. He observed how poverty constrained working people during industrialization. His work on competition for scarce resources gave him a materialist lens: want of resources, in nature as in society, produces genuine suffering and limits what organisms—and people—can achieve or become.
The era
Victorian Britain was a study in extremes: the Industrial Revolution created vast fortunes for factory owners while packing laborers into slums on near-starvation wages. The era's dominant moral framework invoked 1 Timothy to condemn the newly rich. Yet reformers like Dickens and Engels documented that poverty was the greater catastrophe. This quote challenges comfortable moralism by insisting material want destroys character and dignity just as reliably as greed does.
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