Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon with them, but they are the money of fools.

Thomas Hobbes’s remark comes from his mature political philosophy, where he is wary of how language can mislead reasoning and inflame conflict. Writing in the aftermath of the English Civil Wars, Hobbes repeatedly stresses that civil peace depends on clear definitions and disciplined argument rather than rhetorical flourish. In Leviathan he criticizes “abuses of speech”—using words without settled meanings, treating verbal disputes as if they were disputes about things, and letting eloquence substitute for evidence. The line about “counters” and “money” encapsulates this broader concern: words are tools for calculation and communication, but they are often mistaken for reality itself, especially in politics, religion, and moral debate.

Hobbes contrasts two attitudes toward language. For the wise, words are “counters”: conventional tokens used to keep track of ideas and to reason accurately, much like markers in arithmetic. For fools, words become “money”: treated as intrinsically valuable, hoarded, spent for show, or exchanged as if mere verbal possession were knowledge. The aphorism warns against verbalism—confusing naming with understanding, and winning arguments by terminology rather than by grasping causes and consequences. In Hobbes’s view, this error is not merely intellectual; it can be politically dangerous, because disputes over ambiguous words can harden into faction and violence when people treat slogans and formulas as realities.

“Words are wise men’s counters; they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.”