Money Quotes

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)

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 [↩]

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 [↩]

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). [↩]

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 [↩]

1. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
2. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
3. You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
4. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
5. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
6. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
7. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
8. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
9. You cannot build character and courage by destroying men’s initiative and independence.
10. And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

- William J. H. Boetcker¹

1. As quoted from his Wikipedia article [↩]

It’s easier to create money than to spend it.

- Warren Buffet¹

1. Linda Grant, “Striking Out at Wall Street,” U.S. News & World Report, June 20, 1994, p. 58 [↩]

While economic textbooks claim that people and corporations are competing for markets and resources, I claim that in reality they are competing for money – using markets and resources to do so. So designing new money systems really amounts to redesigning the target that orients much human effort.

Furthermore, I believe that greed and competition are not a result of immutable human temperament; I have come to the conclusion that greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using.

For example, we can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, and there is definitely enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The scarcity is in our national currencies. In fact, the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive.

- Bernard Lietaer¹

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