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Who really said it

Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair

Attributed to Dorothy Parker 1893–1967 · American poet, critic & Algonquin Round Table wit
Attributed Rights unconfirmed

Printed under Parker’s name since at least January 1959 — inside her lifetime, and with no rival claimant — but no letter, essay, interview or book of hers has ever been produced containing it. Quote Investigator ↗, which traced the citations, goes no further than saying the line “should be tentatively credited to Dorothy Parker.”

Last verified 17 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair” attributed to Dorothy Parker (1893–1967). Earliest documented printing: the Liverpool Echo, 5 January 1959, already crediting Parker; no primary source in Parker's own writing has been found. Citations traced by Quote Investigator, 19 May 2025.

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We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.

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In context

Evoking the world of Dorothy Parker — American poet, critic & short-story writer. Theme: "Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair". 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.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where the line actually surfaces

Earliest documented printing
The Liverpool Echo
Date & column
5 January 1959, page 8 — “Echoes and Gossip of the Day,” under the sub-heading “Settling Up”
Second 1959 printing
Nantwich Guardian, Cheshire, 19 February 1959 — a filler item, again crediting Parker
Primary source
None located — absent from Parker’s books, letters and verified interviews

Money can’t buy health. but I’d settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair. —Dorothy Parker. Newspaper filler, 1959

As reproduced by Quote Investigator from the Liverpool Echo of 5 January 1959, under the sub-heading “Settling Up” — a one-line filler with no occasion, no interviewer and no source; the stray full stop after “health” is in the transcription. The familiar modern form, “Money cannot buy health,” is the one Evan Esar printed in 1968.

Quote Investigator: the 1959 first citations

How we traced it

  • 5 January 1959 — the earliest appearance anyone has found is a filler line in the Liverpool Echo’s “Echoes and Gossip of the Day” column, headed “Settling Up,” already crediting Dorothy Parker and giving no source of its own. A second English paper, the Nantwich Guardian, ran it on 19 February 1959 (Quote Investigator ↗).
  • 1968 — Evan Esar filed the line under “Health and Wealth” in 20,000 Quips and Quotes, in the now-standard “Money cannot buy health” wording, which carried it into a generation of quotation books; The Portable Curmudgeon reprinted it with the Parker credit in 1987 (Quote Investigator ↗).
  • 2004 — Barry Day placed the line in Dorothy Parker in Her Own Words ↗ beside a genuine 1956 Paris Review remark; Quote Investigator notes the wheelchair line does not occur in that interview and that no supporting citation is given.
  • Still missing — Parker died in 1967, so the 1959 printings fall inside her lifetime, yet no letter, essay, interview or book of hers has ever been produced containing the line, and Wikiquote’s Dorothy Parker page ↗ does not list it in any section.

No work of Parker’s has been shown to contain this sentence, so there is no first publication to date and no copyright status that can honestly be asserted. Its earliest known printing is an unsourced one-line filler in a British newspaper of 5 January 1959, which establishes circulation rather than authorship; quotle.info therefore records the wording’s rights status as undetermined rather than claiming it as public domain.

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 claimed — and what holds

No rival claimant has ever surfaced — Quote Investigator found no plausible alternative attribution — so this is not a case of the wrong name on the right line. The problem is the certainty around it: quotation collections present it as settled Parker, and two specific habits of transmission have quietly manufactured a provenance it does not have.

“Money cannot” vs. “Money can’t” Drift

The earliest printing — the Liverpool Echo of 5 January 1959 — uses the contraction: “Money can’t buy health.” (Quote Investigator does not reproduce the Nantwich Guardian’s wording.) The formal “cannot” that circulates today is the wording Evan Esar printed in 20,000 Quips and Quotes in 1968, and it is that later version the quote sites reproduce (Quote Investigator ↗).

Not from The Paris Review False provenance

Barry Day’s 2004 Dorothy Parker in Her Own Words sets the line next to a genuine 1956 Paris Review answer from Parker, which invites readers to treat the interview as its source. Quote Investigator notes the wheelchair line does not occur in that interview, and that Day supplies no citation for it (Quote Investigator ↗).

“Dorothy Parker said…” Overclaim

Quotation sites print it as fact. The specialists do not: Quote Investigator concluded only that the saying “should be tentatively credited to Dorothy Parker” (Quote Investigator ↗), and Wikiquote’s Parker page ↗ does not list the line at all.

The honest position is the one Quote Investigator reached: two English newspapers were crediting Parker with the joke by early 1959, within her lifetime and with no competing claimant, so it should be tentatively credited to her — but nothing she is known to have written or said contains it. Quote Investigator ↗

Context

Why it sounds exactly like her

The joke is built the way Parker’s best one-liners are built: set up a pious platitude, then refuse to be improved by it. “Money cannot buy health” is the sort of thing that belongs on a hospital wall; the diamond-studded wheelchair is the Algonquin table’s answer to it. That structural fit is genuinely part of the evidence — but it is also precisely why unattached jokes drift toward famous wits in the first place.

What the paper trail actually shows is thinner than the confidence of the quote sites. The two earliest printings anyone has found are both filler items in English regional newspapers — the Liverpool Echo on 5 January 1959 and the Nantwich Guardian on 19 February 1959 — each crediting Parker, neither saying where or when she said it. That is the classic profile of a line already circulating by word of mouth before it reached print, which makes the original occasion very hard to recover.

“Tentatively credited” is as far as the evidence goes — and further than most quote sites admit.

How the modern wording took hold

The earliest printing, the Liverpool Echo of 5 January 1959, uses the contraction: “Money can’t buy health.” (Quote Investigator does not reproduce the Nantwich Guardian’s wording.) The formal “Money cannot buy health” that dominates today is the version quotation-collector Evan Esar filed under “Health and Wealth” in 20,000 Quips and Quotes in 1968, and that is the form later collections reproduce — The Kansas City Times in 1977, The Portable Curmudgeon in 1987, and onward, all per Quote Investigator ↗.

Quote Investigator also records the image escaping Parker altogether: a 1974 Circus magazine piece on the band Brownsville Station has members saying they would not mind being paralysed in a car wreck “as long as I can go in a diamond-studded wheelchair.” A good joke keeps travelling; the citation that would prove who told it first does not.

Explore

Filed under

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

Happiness Success Mortality

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.

Quote Origin: Money Cannot Buy Health, But I'd Settle for a Diamond-Studded Wheelchairquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: the 1959 Liverpool Echo and Nantwich Guardian citations, Evan Esar's 1968 wording, Barry Day's 2004 placement, and the conclusion that the line is only tentatively Parker's.
Wikiquote: Dorothy Parkeren.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's sourced, attributed and misattributed sections for Parker. Worth noting for what is absent: the wheelchair line appears nowhere on the page.
Dorothy Parker in Her Own Words (2004), ed. Barry Dayarchive.org

The Taylor Trade collection that printed the line beside a genuine 1956 Paris Review remark — the juxtaposition that has led readers to assume an interview source.
Enough Rope: Poems (1926)www.gutenberg.org

Parker's bestselling first collection, free in full — the place to hear the real cadence of her epigrams, including 'Resume' and 'One Perfect Rose'.
Dorothy Parkeren.wikipedia.org

Biography and dates: born 22 August 1893, died 7 June 1967; Vanity Fair, the Algonquin Round Table, The New Yorker, Hollywood and the blacklist.

About the author

Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker

1893–1967 · American poet, critic & short-story writer

Born Dorothy Rothschild in Long Branch, New Jersey, Parker became a theatre critic for Vanity Fair in 1918 and a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, the lunch circle whose wisecracks were syndicated across America. Her poetry collection Enough Rope (1926) was a bestseller, and she went on to write short stories, New Yorker criticism and Hollywood screenplays, earning two Academy Award nominations before being placed on the Hollywood blacklist. Being the most quotable woman of her generation is exactly why lines she never wrote keep arriving under her name.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite this page

Earliest documented appearance: “Settling Up,” in “Echoes and Gossip of the Day,” The Liverpool Echo (Merseyside, England), January 5, 1959, p. 8, crediting Dorothy Parker; no primary source in Parker’s own writing has been located. Citations traced in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Money Cannot Buy Health, But I’d Settle for a Diamond-Studded Wheelchair,” May 19, 2025.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/money-cannot-buy-health-but-id-settle-for-a-diamond-studded/

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