QUOTES,
Famous and Infamous

That I think, say something important

Collected quotes on money, John Adams, William Paterson, Bank of England, John Kenneth Galbraith, Modern Money Mechanics, H. W. White, Associated Banks of New Zealand, Susan George, Kenneth Boulding, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, President James Garfield, New York Mayor John F. Hylan, Thomas Jefferson, Sir Josiah Stamp, Bank of England, John Locke, Hazard Circular, Civil War, London Times, The Globalization of Poverty, Michel Chossudovsky, Give Me Liberty!, Gerry Spence, Roger Terry, Peter Cook.

• All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.
  -John Adams.
  
  
• What was true then, remains true today concerning ignorance of money. Honor and virtue may be in question, today, particularly so, in view ot the Presidency during the last two decades.
  The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.
  -William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England, c1694.
  
  The William Paterson quote is the essential "trick" of banking. However much it is denied by some establishment economists, journalists, politicians, and other propaganda hucksters, this "trick" remains true of modern banking.
  
  

• The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
  -John Kenneth Galbraith.
  
  
• Changes in the quantity of money may originate with actions of the Federal Reserve System (the central bank), depository institutions (principally commercial banks), or the public. The major control, however, rests with the central bank.
  -Modern Money Mechanics, published by FRB Chicago, pg. 3.
  
  
• The process of money creation takes place primarily in banks.
  -Modern Money Mechanics, published by FRB Chicago, pg. 3.
  
  
• Of course, they [banks] do not really pay out loans from the money they receive as deposits. If they did this, no additional money would be created. What they do when they make loans is to accept promissory notes in exchange for credits to the borrowers' transaction accounts.
  -Modern Money Mechanics, published by FRB Chicago, pg. 6.
  
  
• The banks do create money. They have been doing it for a long time, but they didn't quite realise it, and they did not admit it. Very few did. You will find it in all sorts of documents, financial textbooks, etc. But in the intervening years, and we must all be perfectly frank about these things, there has been a development of thought, until today I doubt very much whether you would get many prominent bankers to attempt to deny that banks create credit.
  -H. W. White, Chairman of the Associated Banks of New Zealand, to the New Zealand Monetary Commission, 1955.
  
  
• Susan George correctly emphasizes in her review of my book, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, "The cancer stage of capitalism is not a metaphor. It is a rigorous description of where we are." The current financial stripping of economies and environments across the world exhibits, in fact, all the hallmark characteristics of a carcinogenic invasion. As on the cellular level, an uncontrolled rogue sequence of reproduction invades and self-multiplies across social borders with no committed function to life-hosts. As on the cellular level, the cancer advances by not being recognized by surrounding life communities. —John McMurtry, Professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph, in Economic Reform, Vol. 11, Number 3, March 1999
  
  
• For our economic textbooks to have been accurate, they would need to be printed in blood. The blood of indigenous peoples destroyed so their land could be taken, bought, and sold. The blood of salmon, beaver, and buffalo commoditized and killed for the money they have come to represent. The blood of all of us whose lives are diminished in the act of commodifying others. The blood of slaves and wage slaves who spend their lives toiling so their owners may have the leisure that is the birthright of every living being. The blood of the land itself, poisoned by "externalities," those cumbersome details too dark or difficult or inconvenient to take their place in the economic equations that guide so much of our lives. The blood of everyone who is silenced by economic theory. In the same vein as our science and religion, the most obvious function of our economics is the erection of a sociopolitical framework on which to base a system of exploitation.
  
  
• Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
  -Kenneth Boulding, economist.
  
  
• Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its laws.
  -Mayer Amschel Rothschild
  
  
• Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.
  -President James Garfield.
  
  
• The real menace of our republic is the invisible government, which, like a giant octopus, sprawls its slimy length over our city, state and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses generally referred to as international bankers. This little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually runs our government for their own selfish ends.
  -New York Mayor John F. Hylan, c1922.
  
  
• I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a money aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks, and restored to the people.
  -Thomas Jefferson.
  
  
• If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
  -Thomas Jefferson.
  
  

• Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the earth; take it away from them but leave them with the power to create credit; and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again. Take this power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for then this world would be a happier and better world to live in. But if you want to be slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the bankers control money and control credit.
  -Sir Josiah Stamp, Director, Bank of England, c1940.
  
  
• But if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going, it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected, and without which, ancient names and specious forms are so far from being better, that they are much worse than the state of Nature or pure anarchy; the inconveniencies being all as great and as near, but the remedy farther off and more difficult.
  -John Locke, CONCERNING CIVIL GOVERNMENT, Chap. XIX. Of the Dissolution of Government, #225.
  
  
• Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power, and chattel slavery abolished. This, I and my European friends are in favor of, for slavery is but the owning of labor, and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led on by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages. . . . The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of the war must be used to control the value of money. To accomplish this, the Government bonds must be used as a banking basis. . . . We are now waiting for the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States to make this recommendation. It will not do to allow greenbacks, as they are called, to circulate as money any length of time, as we cannot control that, but we can control the bonds and through them the bank issues.
  -"Hazard Circular" circulated to U. S. banks during the campaign for the National Bank Acts during the Civil War.
  
  
• If this mischievous financial policy [ U. S. Notes or greenbacks issued by the government without interest] which has had its origin in the North American Republic during the late war [Civil War] should become endurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debts. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become properous beyond precedent in the history of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.
  -"London Times" editorial.
  
  
• The movement of the global economy is "regulated" by "a worldwide process of debt collection" which constricts the institutions of the national state and contributes to destroying employment and economic activity. from
  - The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order by Michel Chossudovsky.
  
  
• If we are the new American slaves, then who is our master? The New Master, like some monster escaped from the laboratories of a noble experiment called the American dream, is the sum total of an amoral coupling between government and business. It looms as a monolith hybrid that is neither government nor business and is composed of individual strands of power that include the president, Congress, the courts—a multitude of governing bureaus and agencies, and an immense cluster of multinational corporations, some as wealthy as great nations.
  - Give Me Liberty: Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century by Gerry Spence.
  
  

• Our current economy is a predatory system far worse than any seen in nature. Where else but among human predators do individuals try to hoard much more than they can ever use? The human predator, I argue, is unlike all others. Instead of being simply the fulfillment of its own nature, the human predator is to a large degree the product of a system—an artificial environment shaped by beliefs and rules and customs—that allows the predatory tendency to run rampant.
  -Roger Terry in Economic Insanity.
  
  
• There are no greater human and civil rights violations than the withholding of economic and financial livelihoods of peoples. There is no greater "terrorism" than financial manipulation of the peoples’ livelihoods for political and financial gain. The educators, the ministers, the rabbis, the political leaders, and the peoples’ elected representatives, including in the United States, emerge as the unwitting "terrorists"—who in silence, some perhaps for financial and political gain, condone Capitalism’s (Bankerism’s) recondite harvesting of the fruits of the productive society’s labors.
  -Peter Cook, Monetary Science Publishing, in Reserves, Deposits and Central Banks.
  
  

 

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