I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.

The remark condemns a life organized around profit as an end in itself. By calling such a person “despicable and pathetic,” the speaker frames money-only striving as both morally small (despicable) and emotionally impoverished (pathetic): it reduces human purpose to a single, endlessly self-referential metric. Implicitly, the quote contrasts accumulation with more durable aims—service, family, faith, civic duty, or philanthropy—suggesting that wealth has value chiefly as a means. Coming from a famously wealthy industrialist, the sentiment also functions as a self-justifying ethic: the pursuit of money is defensible only when subordinated to broader responsibilities and uses beyond personal gain.