Quotes About Money ...
as well as Industry, Entrepreneurialism and Work Ethic

And not just any kind of money, no siree. We mean the kind that grows on trees. Or at least, that's made from trees. We're talkin' cellulose, rag linen, ink and pictures of assorted, deceased notables ... we're talkin' paper money!

The following quotes are from an elite assortment of past U.S. presidents, world class statesmen and leading intellectuals (obviously a lazy, disaffected bunch of know-nothings, every one of them, so please keep that in mind as you read.)
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“Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value, zero.”
  -- Voltaire

"Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money."
  -- Daniel Webster

"Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice."
  -- George Washington, in a letter to J. Bowen, Rhode Island, January 9, 1787

"The constitution, therefore, considers the emission of bills of credit [printing of paper money], and the enactment of tender laws, as distinct operations ... Both are forbidden."
  -- U.S. Supreme Court, Craig v. Missouri, 4 Peters 410

"Madison, agreeing with the journal of the [constitutional] convention, records that the grant of power to emit bills of credit [issue paper money] was refused by a majority of more than four to one. The evidence is perfect; no power to emit paper money was granted to the legislature of the United States."
  -- George Bancroft in A Plea for the Constitution (1886)

"No state shall emit bills of credit, make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts, coin money ..."
  -- Article One, Section Ten, United States Constitution

"All the perplexities, confusion and distresses in America arise not from defects in the constitution or confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, as much from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation."
  -- John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson

"Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce."
  -- President James A. Garfield

"You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out."
  -- President Andrew Jackson to a delegation of bankers

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
  -- Abraham Lincoln in a letter from to Col. William F. Elkins, November 21, 1864

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson."
  -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

"The decrease in purchasing power incurred by holders of money due to inflation imparts gains to the issuers of money ...".
  -- St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, Review, Nov. 1975, p.22

"Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing."
  -- Ralph M. Hawtrey, former Secretary of Treasury, England

"Without the confidence factor, many believe a paper money system is liable to collapse eventually."
  -- Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in Gold, p. 10

“We are in danger of being overwhelmed with irredeemable paper, mere paper, representing not gold nor silver; no sir, representing nothing but broken promises, bad faith, bankrupt corporations, cheated creditors and a ruined people.”
  -- Daniel Webster, speech in the Senate, 1833

“I sincerely believe ... that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
  -- Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816

"Commercial banks create checkbook money whenever they grant a loan, simply by adding new deposit dollars in accounts on their books in exchange for a borrower's IOU."
  -- Federal Reserve Bank of New York in I Bet You Thought, p.19

"Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money and control credit, and with a flick of a pen they will create enough to buy it back."
  -- Sir Josiah Stamp, former President, Bank of England

"If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer."
  -- John Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920, page 240

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose."
  -- John Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920, page 235ff

"Those who create and issue money and credit direct the policies of government and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."
  -- Rt. Hon. Reginald McKenna, former Chancellor of Exchequer, England

"A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interest, combined in one mass; and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks."
  -- John C. Calhoun, Speech May 27, 1836

"The Federal Reserve Act lets us print all we'll need. And it won't frighten the people. It won't look like stage money. It'll be money that looks like real money."
  -- Treasury Secretary Woodin, March 7, 1933 quoted in Closed for the Holiday: The Bank Holiday of 1933, p20 - Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

“The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.”
  -- John Kenneth Galbraith in Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, 1975, p15

“The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.”
  -- John Kenneth Galbraith in Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went. 1975, p29

“The legal tender quality [of money] is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty.”
  -- Chief Justice Salmon Chase, formerly Secretary of Treasury in President Lincoln’s administration, in dissent of Knox vs. Lee (The Legal Tender Cases, 1871)

"The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. The banking powers are more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. They denounce as public enemies all who question their methods or throw light upon their crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe."
  -- Abraham Lincoln

"... back in 1927 and 1928, when the world was a tornado of prosperity of the paper persuasion ... I said that this thing had happened before, many times; and invariably it had also happened that the balloon was pricked, and deflation followed; that the inevitable penalty for a boom was a crash; that whatever political party happened to be in power when the smash arrived, would be the object of loathing and contempt; and that for several years the disillusioned populace would be so busy pitying themselves that they would become the victims of every impostor and imposture that effrontery and ignorance could contrive ..."
  -- Freeman Tilden in his 1935 book A World in Debt

"With the monetary system we have now, the careful saving of a lifetime can be wiped out in an eyeblink."
  -- Larry Parks, Executive Director, FAME

"I now deny [the Federal Government's] power of making paper money or anything else a legal tender."
  -- Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1798. ME 10:65


And finally, we could not leave you without these immortal words about industry, entrepreneurialism and a strong work ethic.

"Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime."
  -- ancient Chinese proverb

"If you give a person a fish, they'll fish for a day. But if you train a person to fish, they'll fish for a lifetime."
  -- Dan Quayle, former U.S. Vice-President

"Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong already, it just hasn't happened yet."
  -- Stubby Candle's Fourth Quantum Corollary to Murphy's Law

"The high minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think." -- Aristotle

"When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do."
  -- William Blake

"As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities."
  -- Voltaire

"Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true."
  — Buddha, Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta

"Those who do not overthrow five thousand years of human history are doomed to repeat it."
  — Xarvon, alien investigator

"... most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right:
  — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance (1841)

"One of the world's greatest problems is the impossibility of any person searching for the truth on any subject when they believe they already have it."
  — Dave Wilbur

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."
  -- Thomas A. Edison

"The unaware are unaware of being unaware."
  — Merrill Jenkins, economist

"You are a slow learner, Winston," said O'Brien gently. "How can I help it?" he blubbered. "How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four." "Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane."
  -- George Orwell, in '1984'

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
  — Arthur Schopenhauer

"It's not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true."
  — Henry Kissinger

"I was provided with additional input that was radically different from the truth. I assisted in furthering that version."
  — Oliver North

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”
  — Niels Bohr

"By the very definition of the term 'average intelligence,' fully one-half of the populace falls below."
  — Dr. Philip G. Olson, PC, DJ

"Language is only necessary when communication is endangered!"
  — Dr. Irwin Corey, comedian, philosopher, but I repeat myself.

"A statistician is someone who can stand with one foot on the burner of a red hot stove and the other in a bucket of ice water and say that, on the average, he's perfectly comfortable."
  — Stubby Candles

"An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing, while a generalist is someone who knows less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything."
  — Stubby Candles

"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual."
  -- Frank Herbert

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
  -- Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)

"The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated."
  -- Bertrand Russell, philosopher, educator

"No one more sincerely wishes the spread of information among mankind than I do, and none has greater confidence in its effect towards supporting free and good government."
  -- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Trustees for the Lottery of East Tennessee College, May 1810)

"To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace."
  -- Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Roman historian.

"The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself."
  -- Archibald Macleish

"Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph."
  -- Haile Selassie

"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauchd in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders."
  -- Samuel Adams (letter to James Warren, 4 November 1775)

"Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves."
  -- D. H. Lawrence

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
  -- James Madison

"The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad."
  -- James Madison

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive... those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
  -- C. S. Lewis, British novelist

"The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."
  -- Thomas Jefferson

"For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are."
  -- Niccolo Machiavelli, Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active."
  -- John Philpot Curran, Irish Orator

"For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life."
  -- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

"One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence."
  -- Charles Austin Beard

"I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts." -- John Locke

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."
  -- Thomas Jefferson (letter to William Charles Jarvis, 28 September 1820)

"Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may."
  -- Mark Twain

"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
  -- Henry David Thoreau

"A good conscience is a continual Christmas." -- Benjamin Franklin

"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
  -- Thomas Jefferson

"The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded."
  -- Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave."
  -- H. L. Mencken

"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government."
  -- Thomas Jefferson

"Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals; that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government; that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection against the government."
  -- Ayn Rand

"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."
  — Thomas Jefferson

"If we would have civilization and the exertion indispensable to its success, we must have property; if we have property, we must have its rights; if we have the rights of property, we must take those consequences of the rights of property which are inseparable from the rights themselves."
  -- James Fenimore Cooper

"Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."
  -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
  -- Margaret Mead

"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder."
  -- George Washington

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
  -- Thomas Jefferson

"The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few to ride them." -- Thomas Jefferson

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous."
  -- Carl Sagan

"We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal."
  — Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Why We Can't Wait, 1963

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable."
  -- Howard Zinn, U.S. historian, 1993

"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles."
  — Eugene Victor Debs

"The thought that The State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied." — Arthur Miller, playwright

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
  — Noam Chomsky

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
  — Bishop Desmond Tutu

"War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today."
  — John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"More than at any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
  — Woody Allen

"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
  — James Madison, Federalist No. 10

"The Constitution ... is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please."
  — Thomas Jefferson

"Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive."
  — Henry Steele Commager, Historian and author

"Nothing in the world is more haughty than a man of moderate capacity when once raised to power."
  — Baron Wessenberg

"I can train a monkey to wave an American flag. That does not make the monkey patriotic."
  — Scott Ritter

"Can we truly expect that those who aim to exploit us can be trusted to educate us?"
  — Eric Schaub, individualist, activist, speaker, author

“To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire, and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.”
  — Tacitus, Roman historian

"My country is the world. My religion is to do good."
  — Thomas Paine

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
  — Mohandas Gandhi

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
  — Buckminster Fuller

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."
  — Eric Hoffer

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little."
  — Edmund Burke

"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men."
  -- Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
  — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russian novelist

"War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other."
  — Paul Valery, French poet, essayist and critic

"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
  — Albert Einstein

'If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks.'
  — Frederick The Great

"To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."
  — Thomas Jefferson

"The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honor you can bestow on him. It means that you recognize his superiority to yourself."
  — Joseph Sobran

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
  — Mark Twain

"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
  — George Bernard Shaw

"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
  — Frederic Bastiat, French Economist

"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."
  — Will Rogers

"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free."
  — P.J. O'Rourke

In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.
 -- Voltaire

"The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other."
  — Ronald Reagan

"I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work."
  -- Thomas Edison

“If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behavior.”
  -- Henry David Thoreau

"Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation."
  -- Howard Scott

“It seems to me that Islam, Christianity and Judaism all have the same god, he's just telling them all different things.”
  -- Billy Connolly, Scottish comedian

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