“No man is rich enough to buy back his past.”
Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
Context & Editorial Note
This line is spoken in the first act of Wilde's 1895 play, in a scene where a single early moral compromise — a state secret sold for money — returns to govern a statesman's entire later life. The play is built around the market price of an unbought conscience, and the line states its theorem: wealth operates only forward. In the archive's reading, it is the negative image of every compounding story — the one account that accepts no deposits.
Ethics