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Who really said it

God gave me my money

Attributed to John D. Rockefeller 1839–1937 · American industrialist and philanthropist
Attributed Free to reuse

Rockefeller is very widely and credibly credited with the line, and his 1932 biographer John T. Flynn thought it central enough to name a book after it. But the printed page it came from has not been produced: reference works disagree on whether the Woman’s Home Companion article that carried it ran in December 1905 or in 1915, and no digitised copy of that issue could be located to confirm the six words as Rockefeller spoke them.

Last verified 6 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“God gave me my money” attributed to John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937). Traced to a Woman's Home Companion profile (cited as December 1905, p. 14) and quoted in John T. Flynn's God's Gold (1932); no scan of the original page has been located, and the longer "power to make money is a gift from God" passage comes from a separate interview. Quotle.info

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Evoking the world of John D. Rockefeller — Standard Oil founder and philanthropist. Theme: "God gave me my money". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

Where it comes from

Speaker
John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937)
Cited in
Woman’s Home Companion
Issue
December 1905, p. 14 — though Wikiquote’s entry gives 1915
Carried forward by
John T. Flynn, God’s Gold (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932)

God gave me my money. Original article not located

That is the whole of it. Every reference work quotes the same six words with no surrounding sentence, because the Woman’s Home Companion article they point to has not been digitised — so nobody quoting it today is quoting the page. The longer passage usually printed after it (“I believe the power to make money is a gift of God …”) is a separate statement to a different reporter and does not belong in the same set of quotation marks.

Wikiquote: John D. Rockefeller, sourced quotes

The paper trail

  • Wikiquote ↗ places the line in its main sourced Quotes section — not under Attributed, Disputed or Misattributed — citing Woman’s Home Companion (1915), quoted in God’s Gold (1932) by John T. Flynn.
  • Arthur C. Brooks ↗ gives the most specific citation on record: Reo Bennett, “How the Richest Man in the World Observes Christmas,” Woman’s Home Companion, December 1905, 14.
  • John T. Flynn thought the remark defining enough to name his Rockefeller biography after it — a first-edition listing ↗ of the 1932 Harcourt, Brace printing says Flynn based his title on the statement. The book itself is borrowable at the Internet Archive ↗.
  • The December 1905 issue cannot be checked online: the digitised runs of the magazine listed by the Online Books Page ↗ do not include a 1905 volume.
Public domain

Both candidate printings of the line are pre-1931 American periodical issues of Woman’s Home Companion — December 1905 on Brooks’s citation, 1915 on Wikiquote’s — so the wording is in the public domain in the United States either way. John T. Flynn’s God’s Gold (1932), which quotes it, is a separate work and its own text is not covered by that finding.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What gets mangled

This is not a fabricated quote. It is a real remark that has been re-dated, re-worded and glued to a second remark until the version most people share is not something Rockefeller said in one breath.

Two statements spliced into one Composite

AZQuotes ↗ runs “God gave me my money” straight into “I believe the power to make money is a gift from God …” as a single continuous quotation, crediting the whole block to Collier and Horowitz’s The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976). Wikiquote ↗ keeps them apart, with different sources: the six-word line to Woman’s Home Companion, the longer passage to an interview with William Hoster.

December 1905, or 1915? Unsettled

Arthur C. Brooks ↗ cites Reo Bennett, “How the Richest Man in the World Observes Christmas,” Woman’s Home Companion, December 1905, page 14. Wikiquote ↗ gives the same magazine but the year 1915. Ten years apart, same six words, and no scan on the open web to settle it — the digitised runs listed by the Online Books Page ↗ do not include a 1905 volume.

“gift of God” vs “gift from God” Variant

In the longer companion statement, Wikiquote ↗ prints “a gift of God” while Brooks ↗ prints “a gift from God.” A one-word drift, but it is the sort that tells you the text has been passed hand to hand rather than read off the page.

The belief was unmistakably Rockefeller’s, and his own biographer John T. Flynn built a book title on the remark ↗ in 1932. What nobody has produced is the page it was printed on.

Context

Six words, at the worst possible moment

Nineteen-oh-five was not a quiet year to say that God had handed you your money. That spring, the Congregational Church’s foreign missions board accepted $100,000 from Rockefeller, and the pastor Washington Gladden demanded it be sent back on the grounds that Standard Oil had earned it with “utter disregard to the ordinary principles of business morality.” He lost badly — only 25 of 189 board members backed him — but the phrase “tainted money” stuck to Rockefeller for the rest of his life. You can read the whole fight, refereed by a historian, at The Conversation ↗.

Into that argument dropped a Christmas profile in Woman’s Home Companion — not a business paper but a general-interest women’s monthly that, under editor Arthur T. Vance, had started running investigative pieces on child labour alongside the housekeeping. Depending on which editorial page you read, the six words in it were a plain statement of stewardship or the most tone-deaf sentence in America. Three decades later John T. Flynn settled the matter commercially by putting the sentiment on a book cover: God’s Gold.

Flynn did not merely quote the line — he made it the title.

What about the longer version everyone posts?

Wikiquote lists a second, separate Rockefeller statement: “I believe the power to make money is a gift of God … to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind.” Its citation there is an interview with the reporter William Hoster, again by way of Flynn’s God’s Gold — a different journalist, a different occasion.

Arthur C. Brooks dates that Hoster interview to 1906 and the New York American, citing Jules Abels, The Rockefeller Billions (Macmillan, 1965), 279–80. So the block of text that circulates as one grand pronouncement is two documented remarks, roughly a year apart, welded end to end by later anthologists.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Power Success Purpose

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

John D. Rockefelleren.wikiquote.org

The anchor reference. Lists the six-word line in its sourced Quotes section, and lists the longer “gift of God” passage separately as a William Hoster interview.
Arthur C. Brooks, “Why Giving Matters”speeches.byu.edu

Carries the fullest citation anyone gives: Reo Bennett, Woman’s Home Companion, December 1905, page 14.
Why Giving Matters (BYU Magazine)magazine.byu.edu

Dates the longer “power to make money” statement to 1906 and the New York American, via William Hoster in Jules Abels’ The Rockefeller Billions.
God’s Gold: The Story of Rockefeller and His Timesarchive.org

Borrowable copy of John T. Flynn’s biography — the book that carried both quotations into general circulation.
God’s Gold, first editionbaumanrarebooks.com

Bookseller’s description of the 1932 Harcourt, Brace first edition, noting that Flynn took his title from the remark.
Woman’s Home Companion holdingsonlinebooks.library.upenn.edu

The Online Books Page index of digitised runs — useful for seeing exactly which volumes are, and are not, available to check.

The man behind the line

Who was John D. Rockefeller?

John D. Rockefeller

1839–1937 · Standard Oil founder and philanthropist

Born in Richford, New York on 8 July 1839, John Davison Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company on 10 January 1870 and rode it to a fortune with no modern equal. He was also a devout Northern Baptist who read scripture daily, taught Sunday school and served as trustee and clerk of his Cleveland church — which is exactly why a remark about God and money from him carried so much charge. In later life he built the machinery of modern philanthropy, founding the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1901 and the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, and died at Ormond Beach, Florida on 23 May 1937.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Best available citation

Reo Bennett, “How the Richest Man in the World Observes Christmas,” Woman’s Home Companion, December 1905, 14 — as cited in Arthur C. Brooks, “Why Giving Matters,” BYU Speeches. Wikiquote instead cites Woman’s Home Companion (1915), quoted in John T. Flynn, God’s Gold: The Story of Rockefeller and His Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932). No digitised copy of the original article has been located.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘God gave me my money’?” Last verified 6 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/god-gave-me-my-money/

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