To take the money and run is to accept what you have already won or gained and stop there, rather than pushing your luck for more. It is often said of someone cashing out while they are ahead, whether at the gambling table, in a business deal, or in any situation where greed for a bigger prize might cost them what they already have. There is usually a hint of self-interest built into the phrase too, a suggestion of grabbing what is on offer without worrying much about loyalty, fairness, or what happens to anyone else involved.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘take the money and run’?
The saying is dated only loosely to the middle of the twentieth century, and no specific coiner or founding scene has been identified. The idioms dictionary that defines the phrase admits as much, noting that “the original allusion is lost, but other than referring to theft, it might well allude to one’s winnings at gambling.” That uncertainty over whether the phrase first pictured a gambler cashing in a lucky run or something closer to outright theft has never been resolved.
Its best-known association is with Woody Allen’s crime comedy of the same name, in which he plays a hopeless bank robber. That same idioms dictionary calls it “Woody Allen’s hilarious 1968 film about a compulsive thief,” though the film is more commonly dated 1969, so that year should be treated with some caution. The phrase itself was already current as a stock saying before the film used it as a title, which is presumably why nobody can point to the film as the true coinage, only as its most famous use.
The phrase was picked up again in 1976, when the Steve Miller Band used it as the title of a song on their album Fly Like an Eagle. That song gives the words a quite different, literal story, following a couple, Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue, who kill a man during a robbery and go on the run, closer to a Bonnie-and-Clyde tale of fugitives than to the idiom’s everyday sense of simply being content with a win. The song’s narrative belongs to the song itself and shouldn’t be confused with the origin of the older, looser saying whose title it borrowed.