Marlowe died in 1593, and nothing like this appears in his work — Quote Investigator checked his one famous poem about love, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, which does not mention money or bargaining. The earliest instance QI located is an unsigned item in The Elgin Echo of Elgin, Iowa, on 18 March 1954, worded “Money cannot buy love, but it places one in an excellent bargaining position.” The exact modern phrasing appears in 1977 as a parenthetical that the editor Laurence J. Peter wrote into Peter’s Quotations — and that is where the Marlowe credit was born, by misreading the page.
“Money Can't Buy Love, But It Improves Your Bargaining Position” Anonymous — earliest documented in The Elgin Echo (Elgin, Iowa), 18 March 1954, as "Money cannot buy love, but it places one in an excellent bargaining position"; not Christopher Marlowe, who died in 1593 — traced by Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Christopher Marlowe. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the themes of love, power and truth. Theme: "Money Can't Buy Love, But It Improves Your Bargaining Position". 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 Can't Buy Love, But It Improves Your Bargaining Position". 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
The earliest printing
Earliest documented appearance
“The Elgin Echo”, Elgin, Iowa — 18 March 1954, p. 2, col. 1
Wording there
“Money cannot buy love, but it places one in an excellent bargaining position” — unattributed
Source of the modern wording
A parenthetical written and inserted by the editor in “Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time” (1977), p. 309
Why Marlowe
On that page the parenthesis sits directly above a Marlowe quotation — readers joined them
Money cannot buy love, but it places one in an excellent bargaining position.
The 1954 Elgin Echo wording, as Quote Investigator transcribes it — the earliest instance located, and unattributed. Evan Esar printed a closer variant in 20,000 Quips and Quotes in 1968: “Money cannot buy love, but it can put you in a good bargaining position.”
Quote Investigator’s investigation ↗ is the anchor. Its conclusion: “this comical remark was in circulation by 1954, and initially it was anonymous.”
QI reconstructs how Marlowe’s name got attached. In Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977), page 309, the saying appears in parentheses between a Henry S. Haskins quotation and a Christopher Marlowe quotation. QI states the parenthetical “was written and inserted by the editor Laurence J. Peter though he did not originate the statement”, and hypothesises that readers “incorrectly decided to ascribe the expression between parentheses to Christopher Marlowe”.
The mis-reading then propagated into print: QI documents The Mammoth Book of Great British Humor crediting Marlowe in 2010, and Robert C. Solomon’s Love: Emotion, Myth, and Metaphor crediting Laurence J. Peter in 1981 — two different wrong answers from the same page.
Marlowe’s dates, 1564 to 1593, are confirmed against his Wikipedia entry ↗, which puts him three and a half centuries before the earliest known printing.
No rights claim is made here, because no author can be named. The earliest located printing is a 1954 newspaper item — after the 1931 United States public-domain cut-off — and the exact modern wording was written into a book published in 1977 and still in copyright. quotle.info therefore makes no public-domain claim for this line.
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
Often misattributed
Two names circulate, and both come from the same page of the same 1977 book — one by misreading its typography, the other by over-reading its editor’s role.
✕
The popular creditChristopher Marlowe Impossible
Marlowe died in 1593, some 361 years before the earliest documented printing. QI traces the credit ↗ to readers of Peter’s Quotations (1977) attaching the parenthetical above Marlowe’s name to Marlowe himself.
~
A second creditLaurence J. Peter Worded it, did not originate it
Peter (1919–1990) did write the parenthetical as it appears in his 1977 compilation, and some collections credit him — Robert C. Solomon’s 1981 book among them. But QI is explicit ↗ that “he did not originate the statement”: it was already circulating in 1954.
~
An earlier collectorEvan Esar Printed a variant
Esar included “Money cannot buy love, but it can put you in a good bargaining position” in 20,000 Quips and Quotes in 1968, under “Love and Money”. That is nine years before Peter’s book and fourteen after the Iowa newspaper — a waypoint in the drift, not an origin.
This is the cleanest example in the corpus of a misattribution produced by page layout rather than by anybody’s claim. Nobody ever asserted Marlowe said it. A 1977 editor put his own aside in brackets, the next quotation down happened to be Marlowe’s, and a generation of readers drew the obvious wrong line between them.
What makes it stick is that the joke sounds Elizabethan-adjacent — worldly, cynical, epigrammatic — so the credit never felt absurd enough to check. It is, in fact, a gag from an Iowa newspaper column called “Pipe Dreams”.
Nobody ever asserted Marlowe said it. A bracket and a line break did it for them.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1564–1593 · English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) was an English playwright and poet of the Elizabethan era, author of Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta, and a decisive influence on Shakespeare. He died at twenty-nine. His best-known poem about love, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, is an invitation to pastoral pleasures and mentions neither money nor bargaining — and the quip credited to him here was not printed anywhere until 1954.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
The earliest documented printing (Chicago)
“Rich’s ‘Pipe Dreams’.” The Elgin Echo (Elgin, Iowa), 18 March 1954, 2. Unattributed, reading “Money cannot buy love, but it places one in an excellent bargaining position”; cited by Quote Investigator, “Money Can’t Buy Love, But It Improves Your Bargaining Position,” 5 August 2014. The modern wording appears as an editorial parenthetical in Laurence J. Peter, Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (New York: William Morrow, 1977), 309.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Money Can't Buy Love, But It Improves Your Bargaining Position’?” Last verified 5 Oct 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/money-cant-buy-love-but-it-improves-your-bargaining-position/