The first thing is character, before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it. A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom
Spoken byJ. P. Morgan1837–1913 · American financier and investment banker
Morgan said it under oath on Thursday, 19 December 1912, answering the committee’s counsel Samuel Untermyer, and the words are printed verbatim on page 1084 of Part 15 of the House Money Trust Investigation hearings. The familiar single sentence is a compression: in the transcript these are three separate answers, and the last one begins “Because…”
“The first thing is character, before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it. A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom” J. P. Morgan, testimony before the Pujo subcommittee of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, Washington, D.C., December 19, 1912 — Money Trust Investigation, Part 15 (Government Printing Office, 1913), p. 1084. The popular one-sentence form condenses three consecutive answers to counsel Samuel Untermyer. Verified by Quotle.info
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Provenance
The congressional record, page 1084
Source
Money Trust Investigation … Part 15
Session
Thursday, 19 December 1912 · Washington, D.C.
Page
p. 1084 (Government Printing Office, 1913)
Examiner
Samuel Untermyer, counsel to the Pujo subcommittee
Mr. Untermyer. Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property? Mr. Morgan. No, sir; the first thing is character. Mr. Untermyer. Before money or property? Mr. Morgan. Before money or anything else. Money can not buy it. … Mr. Untermyer. He does not get it on his face or his character, does he? Mr. Morgan. Yes; he gets it on his character. Mr. Untermyer. I see; then he might as well take the bonds home, had he not? Mr. Morgan. Because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.
Pujo Committee hearing · 19 Dec 1912
Every word of the popular quotation is here, in this order — but spread across three answers, with Untermyer’s questions in between and a “Because” opening the last. The transcript also prints “can not” as two words.
Wikiquote files the line in its sourced section, under “Testimony to the Pujo Committee (1912),” and prints it with the seams showing — ellipses and a bracketed [in credit]: J. P. Morgan on Wikiquote ↗.
The transcript itself survives in full. The Government Printing Office issued Morgan’s second day on the stand as Part 15 of the Money Trust Investigation hearings, headed “Washington, D. C., Thursday, December 19, 1912”; the character exchange runs down page 1084 — full plain text at the Internet Archive ↗.
The wording comes from a United States congressional hearing transcript printed by the Government Printing Office in 1913 — a work of the federal government, and in any case published well before 1931. The text is in the public domain in the United States.
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
Genuine — but not as it usually travels
Nothing here is invented. The words are Morgan’s, on the congressional record, under oath. What travels badly is the packaging — and the company the line keeps.
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WordingThe seamless one-sentence version Compressed
Wikiquote prints it with the joins visible: “The first thing [in credit] is character … before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it.… A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.” Delete the ellipses and the bracket and you get the version that circulates — smooth, quotable, and no longer a transcript. Wikiquote’s sourced entry ↗
✕
Adjacent quote“Gold is money. Everything else is credit.” Rewritten
This is the line most often pinned to the same 1912 testimony, and quote sites run it as Morgan with no source and no date — AZQuotes, for one ↗. What the transcript records, a few pages earlier on p. 1081, is blunter and less symmetrical: “That is an evidence of banking, but it is not the money itself. Money is gold, and nothing else.” The polished inversion appears in neither day’s printed transcript — read Part 15 and check ↗
✕
Same author, weaker footing“If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.” Attributed only
The yacht line is the other Morgan quotation everyone knows, and Wikiquote keeps it in its Attributed section, tracing it no further back than a 1961 trade magazine, Business Education World. The character line is a different order of evidence: it is in the congressional record. Compare the two sections ↗
✓Every word of the popular sentence is Morgan’s own, spoken to Samuel Untermyer on 19 December 1912 and printed on page 1084 of Part 15 of the Money Trust Investigation hearings ↗. Only the seams are modern.
Context
Why it mattered
The Pujo subcommittee sat from May 1912 to January 1913 with one question in front of it: had a handful of Wall Street houses quietly taken hold of the country’s credit? Counsel Samuel Untermyer had Morgan on the stand for two days, 18 and 19 December 1912, and on the second morning he tried to close a simple trap — credit rests on money and property, so whoever controls the money controls the credit. Morgan, then seventy-five, refused the premise outright.
It is a strange answer from a man being investigated as a monopolist, and that is exactly why it stuck: the most powerful lender in America, at the peak of an anti-monopoly inquiry, insisting that the thing he actually lends against is trust. He died in Rome on 31 March 1913, roughly three months after saying it. The subcommittee wound up that January, and its findings fed the Federal Reserve Act, the Clayton Anti-trust Act and the Federal Trade Commission — the machinery built so that no single banker’s character would ever matter that much again.
I have known a man to come into my office, and I have given him a check for a million dollars when I knew he had not a cent in the world.
What Untermyer was actually driving at
Untermyer’s next questions on page 1084 are the giveaway. If character is really the basis of credit, he asks, why do banks demand a statement of what a man owns before they lend? Morgan’s reply: “That is what they go into; but the first thing they say is, ‘We want to see your record.’” Pressed on a borrower who puts up government or railroad bonds, Morgan still insists the credit rides on the man — which is where the Christendom line lands, as a retort rather than an aphorism.
The pull quote above comes from the same page, and is the reason the exchange reads as boast rather than piety: Morgan volunteered that he had handed a man a million-dollar check knowing he had not a cent. Untermyer’s dry follow-up — “That is not business?” — got the answer “Yes; unfortunately it is. I do not think it is good business, though.”
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1837–1913 · American financier and investment banker
John Pierpont Morgan dominated American corporate finance for a generation, assembling railroads, U.S. Steel and General Electric out of warring firms and twice acting as a private lender of last resort to the United States Treasury. By December 1912 he was seventy-five, and the House subcommittee investigating the “money trust” had put him on the stand to explain how so few houses came to sit astride the nation’s credit. He died in Rome on 31 March 1913, roughly three months later; this testimony was his last great public performance.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Banking and Currency, Subcommittee. Money Trust Investigation: Investigation of Financial and Monetary Conditions in the United States under House Resolutions Nos. 429 and 504, Part 15. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913, p. 1084 (testimony of J. Pierpont Morgan, 19 December 1912).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The first thing is character, before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it. A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom’?” Last verified 25 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-first-thing-is-character-before-money-or-anything-else/