Money Quotes

As Jesse Owens’ child, your development would not be facilitated by letting you start 100-yard dashes at the 50-yard line.

- Warren Buffett¹

1. Andrew Kilpatrick, Of Permanent Value: The Story of Warren Buffett, (Birmingham: APKE, 1994) p. 98 [↩]

Tyler Durden: We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.

Narrator: Martha Stewart.

Tyler Durden: [...] Martha Stewart! Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic; it’s all going down, man. So [...] off with your sofa units and your Strinne green stripe patterns. I say, never be complete. I say, stop being perfect. I say, let’s evolve, and let the chips fall where they may.

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

- John Maynard Keynes¹

1. As quoted in Moving Forward: Programme for a Participatory Economy (2000) by Michael Albert, p. 128 [↩]

Having, First, gained all you can, and, Secondly saved all you can, Then give all you can.

- John Wesley¹

1. Sermon 50 “The Use of Money” in The Works of the Reverend John Wesley, A.M. (1840) edited by John Emory, Vol. I, p. 446 [↩]

You shall not charge interest on loans to your brother, interest on money, interest on food, interest on anything that is lent for interest.

- Deuteronomy 23:19 (ESV)

You shall not charge interest to your countrymen: interest on money, food, or anything that may be loaned at interest.

- Deuteronomy 23:19 (NASB)

Do not charge your brother interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest.

- Deuteronomy 23:19 (NIV)

Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and parliaments. If we can get rid of the former, we may easily bear the latter.

- Benjamin Franklin¹

1. Letter on the Stamp Act, July 1, 1765, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919) [↩]

Riches are a good handmaid, but the worst mistress.

- Francis Bacon¹

1. De Augmentis Scientiarum, Book II, Antitheta (1623) [↩]

Money is created when banks lend it into existence. When a bank provides you with a $100,000 mortgage, it creates only the principal, which you spend and which then circulates in the economy. The bank expects you to pay back $200,000 over the next 20 years, but it doesn’t create the second $100,000 – the interest. Instead, the bank sends you out into the tough world to battle against everybody else to bring back the second $100,000.

All the banks are doing the same thing when they lend money into existence. That is why the decisions made by central banks, like the Federal Reserve in the US, are so important – increased interest costs automatically determine a larger proportion of necessary bankruptcies.

So when the bank verifies your “creditworthiness,” it is really checking whether you are capable of competing and winning against other players – able to extract the second $100,000 that was never created. And if you fail in that game, you lose your house or whatever other collateral you had to put up.

- Bernard Lietaer¹

1. Beyond Greed and Scarcity in Yes! Magazine, Summer 1997 [↩]

Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

- Warren Buffett¹

1. “The New Establishment 50.” Vanity Fair, October, 1996, p. 280 [↩]

The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods.

- John Maynard Keynes¹

1. National self-sufficiency (1933) Section 3, republished in Collected Works Vol. 11 (1982). [↩]