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Who really said it

Money is like muck, not good except it be spread

Written by Francis Bacon 1561–1626 · English philosopher, statesman & essayist
Verified Free to reuse

The line is genuinely Bacon’s. It appears in essay XV, “Of Seditions and Troubles,” in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (London, 1625) — the final, 58-essay edition published the year before he died. Quote Investigator, which traced the whole “muck” family of sayings, credits Bacon with the statement and cites the 1625 printing via Early English Books Online.

Last verified 7 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Money is like muck, not good except it be spread” Francis Bacon, "Of Seditions and Troubles," essay XV in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (London, 1625). — "Money is like muck, not good except it be spread." Verified by Quotle.info, 7 Aug 2026.

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In context

Evoking the world of Francis Bacon — Lord Chancellor of England, philosopher & essayist. Theme: "Money is like muck, not good except it be spread". 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

The source

Work
“Of Seditions and Troubles,” essay XV, in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall
First published
1625, London — the final, 58-essay edition, a year before Bacon’s death
Author
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (1561–1626)
Language
Written in English — no translation involved

Above all things, good Policie is to be used, that the Treasure and Moneyes in a State be not gathered into few Hands. For otherwise, a State may have a great Stock and yet starve. And Money is like Muck, not good except it be spread. This is done, chiefly, by suppressing, or, at the least, keeping a strait Hand upon the Devouring Trades of Usurie, Ingrossing, great Pasturages, and the like. From the middle of the essay

Old-spelling text as printed in Bacon’s Essays, ed. Alfred S. West (1908), which follows the 1625 edition. Modernised editions read: “and money is like muck, not good except it be spread.”

Read “Of Seditions and Troubles” in full on Wikisource

How we traced it

  • Quote Investigator ↗ is the anchor: it traced the whole “muck” family of sayings and credits Francis Bacon with this statement in his 1625 essay collection, reporting that it consulted The Essayes or Counsels, Ciuill and Morall of 1625 through Early English Books Online.
  • The sentence is present in context in the Wikisource text of the essay ↗, in Alfred S. West’s 1908 edition, inside Bacon’s list of remedies against sedition.
  • Wikiquote’s sourced list for the Essays ↗ files the line under “Of Seditions and Troubles” in the 1625 edition, and the quotation database WIST ↗ independently cites it as Essays, No. 15 (1625).
  • Bacon’s Essays grew across three editions — ten pieces in 1597, thirty-eight in 1612 and fifty-eight in 1625, per Wikipedia’s account of his life and work ↗. The 1625 edition is the one every citation for this line points to.
Public domain

The essay was first published in London in 1625, in Bacon’s lifetime and in his own English — no translator sits between him and the reader. A work published four centuries ago is firmly in the public domain in the United States. Editorial apparatus in a modern reprint (introductions, notes, glossaries) may still be protected, but Bacon’s sentence is not.

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

The credit goes wandering

The attribution to Bacon is correct — but this is one of those sentences that keeps getting re-worded and re-assigned. Here is where the credit has drifted.

King James I 1650

Twenty-five years after Bacon printed it, a collection titled Regales Aphorismi: or a Royal Chain of Golden Sentences presented “money is like muck, not good, unless it be spread” as a saying of James I. Quote Investigator documents the 1650 volume ↗.

Thornton Wilder and Clint Murchison Sr. 20th century

The barnyard word modernised and the credit moved. Quote Investigator records “Money is like manure of no use until it be spread” already in print in The New-Yorker in 1836; then LIFE in 1956 quoting Wilder’s play The Matchmaker — “money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around” — and TIME in 1961 giving a version to oilman Clint Murchison Sr. via his son. QI’s reading is that these modern figures used an existing saying rather than coining one. See the timeline ↗.

Bacon himself — but he credited a “Mr. Bettenham” Credit correction

The expanded stinking-heap-versus-fruitful-field form is routinely quoted as Bacon’s own coinage. In his 1625 Apophthegmes New and Old he attributes it to Mr. Bettenham: “Riches were like Mucke…” Quote Investigator quotes the apophthegm ↗.

Francis Bacon the painter Name collision

Sharing a name with a Jacobean Lord Chancellor is a liability. The other Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992 ↗) was an Irish-born British figurative painter, born long after this sentence was printed.

The short, sharp version — “Money is like muck, not good except it be spread” — is Bacon’s own, from “Of Seditions and Troubles” ↗ in the Essayes of 1625.

Context

Why Bacon said it

The sentence is not a personal-finance maxim — it is a piece of statecraft. Bacon is listing the remedies a ruler should use against sedition, and the one he puts “above all things” is preventing wealth from pooling in a few hands. A country can be rich on paper and hungry in practice: “a State may have a great Stock and yet starve.”

The image is agricultural and deliberately unglamorous. Muck — dung — is worthless piled in a yard and valuable only once it is carted out and spread across a field. Bacon’s policy prescription follows immediately: keep “a strait Hand” on usury, engrossing and great pasturages, the practices he blamed for concentrating wealth.

For otherwise, a State may have a great Stock and yet starve.

The longer version Bacon credited to someone else

In the same year, 1625, Bacon published Apophthegmes New and Old, which contains an expanded form of the same image — and Bacon there credits it not to himself but to a “Mr. Bettenham”: “Riches were like Mucke: When it lay, vpon an heape, it gaue but a stench…but when it was spread vpon the ground, then it was cause of much fruit.” That two-part version is the ancestor of the later proverb about riches stinking in a heap but making the earth fruitful when spread abroad. See Quote Investigator’s survey of the family ↗.

So the compact sentence in the Essays is Bacon’s own phrasing; the longer, stinking-heap version he presented as somebody else’s saying.

Explore

Filed under

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

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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 Investigator: “Riches Are Like Muck…”quoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation. Credits Bacon with the 1625 statement and tracks the whole family — the Bettenham apophthegm, a 1650 book that gave the line to King James I, the 1836 shift to “manure,” and the 20th-century Wilder and Murchison versions.
“Of Seditions and Troubles” (full text)en.wikisource.org

The complete essay in old spelling, from Alfred S. West’s 1908 edition. The sentence sits mid-essay, in the passage on keeping treasure from gathering into few hands.
Essays (Francis Bacon) on Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Sourced quotation list for the Essays, filing this line under “Of Seditions and Troubles” in the 1625 edition.
Bacon’s Essays at Project Gutenbergwww.gutenberg.org

A free public-domain edition (Little, Brown, Boston, 1884) described as a transcript of the edition of 1625 with the posthumous essays. Useful for reading the essay in its book context.
The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. 1 — the essay in modern spellingen.wikisource.org

The same passage in modernised spelling: “and money is like muck, not good except it be spread.” Handy if the 1625 capitalisation is hard going.
WIST Quotations entrywist.info

A curated quotation database that cites the line precisely as “Of Seditions and Troubles,” Essays, No. 15 (1625) — an independent check on the essay number.

The true author

Who was Francis Bacon?

Francis Bacon

1561–1626 · Lord Chancellor of England, philosopher & essayist

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and then Lord Chancellor of England before falling from office in 1621. He is best remembered as an architect of the empirical, experimental approach to knowledge that became the scientific method. His Essays grew across three editions — ten pieces in 1597, thirty-eight in 1612, and fifty-eight in the 1625 edition that contains this sentence.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Francis Bacon, “Of Seditions and Troubles,” essay XV in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (London, 1625); text as printed in Bacon’s Essays, ed. Alfred S. West (1908), via Wikisource.

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Money is like muck, not good except it be spread’?” Last verified 7 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/money-is-like-muck-not-good-except-it-be-spread/

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