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The lack of money is the root of all evil.

— Mark Twain Misattributed While this quote does appear in Twain's posthumous The Refuge of the Derelicts (1905)

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Notes from Wikiquote

The earliest citation found in Google Books is a 1872 article by Richard Bowker: "Our Crime Against Crimes", in The Herald of Health, vol. 19 no. 2, New York: Wood & Holbrook, February 1872. The saying is placed within quotation marks, perhaps indicating that it was already well-known. | A precursor is found in the December 1859 edition of Household Monthly: "It is very well to repeat, parrot-like, the old axiom that 'the love of gold is the root of all evil;' but it is very certain that in truth—the lack of gold is the great incentive to crime."

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More quotes by Mark Twain

Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

Biographies are but clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924)

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Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Mark Twain (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.