FAMOUS QUOTES ABOUT THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM

ADAM SMITH
The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.

THOMAS JEFFERSON
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance 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 their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy.


I have two great enemies: the Southern Army in front of me, and the financial institutions to my rear. Of the two, the one in my rear is my greatest foe…


There should be no war upon property or the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, hence, is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.


Yes; we may all congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its close. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. The best blood of the flower of American youth has been freely offered upon our country's altar that the Nation might live. It has been, indeed a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the 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 endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON
To emit an unfunded paper (paper currency not backed by silver or gold) as the sign of value ought not to continue a formal part of the Constitution, nor even hereafter to be employed; being, in its nature, pregnant with abuses, and liable to be made the engine of imposition and fraud; holding out temptations equally pernicious to the integrity of government and to the morals of the people.

AMSCHEL ROTHSCHILD
Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.

ROTHSCHILD BROTHERS OF LONDON
Those few who can understand the system (check book money and credit) will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on it favors, that there will be little opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear it burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.

HENRY FORD
It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before morning.

VOLTAIRE
At the end fiat money returns to its inner value—zero.

ALAN GREENSPAN
In Gold and Economic Freedom (1968)
The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value... Gold stands in the way of this insidious process.  It stands as a protector of property rights. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the "hidden" confiscation of wealth. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

ROBERT H. HEMPHILL (Credit Manager of Federal Reserve Bank, Atlanta, Georgia)
If all the bank loans were paid, no one could have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation.  This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the Commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are, absolutely, without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon.

CONGRESSMAN JERRY VOORHIS
The banks — commercial banks and the Federal Reserve — create all the money of this nation and its people pay interest on every dollar of that newly created money. Which means that private banks exercise unconstitutionally, immorally, and ridiculously the power to tax the people. For every newly created dollar dilutes to some extent the value of every other dollar already in circulation.

WALTER WRISTON   (1919-2005, a previous chairman of the Citicorp Bank)
If we had a truth-in-Government act comparable to the truth-in-advertising law, every note issued by the Treasury would be obliged to include a sentence stating: 'This note will be redeemed with the proceeds from an identical note which will be sold to the public when this one comes due.'

RUSSELL L. MUNK,
(former Assistant General Counsel, Department of the Treasury)
Federal Reserve Notes are not dollars.  Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are United States government institutions, they are not government institutions, they are private credit monopolies. 
                                                    -- from the Congressional Record, May11, 1972

JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920)
By this means (inflating the currency) government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.

If governments should refrain from regulation, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.

RON PAUL  (former U.S. Congressman)
A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank.

LORD JOSIAH STEMP  (Former Director of the Bank of England)
The modern banking process manufactures currency out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of slight hand that was ever invented…If you want to be slaves of the bankers, and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the banks create currency.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
If the governments devalue the currency in order to betray all creditors, you politely call this procedure 'inflation'.

BARRY GOLDWATER  (former U.S. Senator)
Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States.

BENJAMIN DISRAELI   (former British Prime Minister)
The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.

RICHARD RUSSELL
The history of paper currencies is that they all end up museum pieces, none of them have ever lasted, so if you were to ask me, ‘what would you leave your great-great grandkids say a 100 years from now, 75 years from now', the only answer I would give you is gold. Gold will be money, gold will be an item of value as far as you can look into the future. There’s nothing else that I can say that about.

DANIEL WEBSTER  (1782-1852)
Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring class of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money.

THOMAS PAINE  (1737-1809)
Paper money is like dram-drinking, it relieves for a moment by deceitful sensation, but gradually diminishes the natural heat, and leaves the body worse than it found it. Were not this the case, and could money be made of paper at pleasure, every sovereign in Europe would be as rich as he pleased. But the truth is, that it is a bubble and the attempt vanity. Nature has provided the proper materials for money: gold and silver, and any attempt of ours to rival her is ridiculous....

 MAJOR L.L.B. ANGAS   (former member British House of Commons)
The modern banking system manufactures “money” out of nothing; and the process is, perhaps, the most, astounding piece of “sleight of hand” that was ever invented. In fact, it was not invented. It merely “grew”. ... Banks in fact are able to create (and cancel) modern “deposit money”, just as much as they were originally able to create, or call in, their own original forms of private notes. They can, in fact, inflate and deflate, i.e., mint, and un-mint the modern “ledger-entry” currency.                                        from Slump Ahead in Bonds. Somerset Pub. Co.. pp. 20-21  (1937)

LOUIS T. McFADDEN
(former U.S. Congressman and Chairman of the Committee on Banking and Currency)
"... we have in this Country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks.... This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of the United States.... Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the Benefit of themselves and their foreign customers. ..." "The Federal Reserve (Banks) are one of the most corrupt institutions, the world has ever seen. There is not a man, within the sound of my voice, who does not know that this Nation is run by the International Bankers".  "The Fed has cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the Nation's debt.... The wealth of these United States and the working capital have been taken away from them and has either been locked in the vaults of certain banks and the great corporations or exported to foreign countries for the benefit of foreign customers of these banks and corporations. So far as the people of the United States are concerned, the cupboard is bare."

JAMES MADISON
The prime function of government is the protection of the different and unequal faculties of men for acquiring property. History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance. The extension of the prohibition to bills of credit must give pleasure to every citizen, in proportion to his love of justice and his knowledge of the true springs of public prosperity. The loss which America has sustained since the peace from the pestilent effects of paper money on the necessary confidence between man and man, on the necessary confidence in the public councils, on the industry and morals of the people and on the character of republican government, constitutes an enormous debt against the States chargeable with this unadvised measure, which must long remain unsatisfied; or rather an accumulation of guilt, which can be expiated no otherwise than by a voluntary sacrifice on the altar of justice of the power which has been the instrument of it. In addition to these persuasive considerations, it may be observed that the same reasons which show the necessity of denying to the States the power of regulating coin, prove with equal force that they ought not to be at liberty to substitute a paper medium in the place of the coin.

JOHN ADAMS
All the perplexities, confusions and distresses in America arise not from defects in the constitution or confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, as much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.

CHARLES LINDBERG, SR.
Ever since the Civil War, Congress has allowed the bankers to control financial legislation. The membership of the Finance Committee in the Senate (now the Banking and Currency Committee) and the Committee on Banking and Currency in the House have been made up chiefly of bankers, their agents, and their attorneys. In this way the committees have been able to control legislation in the interests of the few.

This Act (Federal Reserve Act) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized... The worst legislative crime of the age is perpetrated by this banking and currency bill. The caucus of the party bosses have again operated and prevented the people from getting the benefits of their own government.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; second is war. Both bring a temporary (and false) prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

GEORGE WASHINGTON
I am sanguine in the belief of the possibility that we may one day become a great commercial and flourishing nation. But if in the pursuit of the means we should unfortunately stumble again on un-funded paper money or any similar species of fraud, we shall assuredly give a fatal stab to our national credit in its infancy. Paper money will invariably operate in the body of politics as spirit liquors on the human body. They prey on the vitals and ultimately destroy them.

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.
                                                                    (letter to J. Bowen, Rhode Island, Jan. 9, 1787)

THOMAS A. EDISON
People who will not turn a shovel of dirt on the project, nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money, from the United States, than will the people, who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest (usury). But here is the point: If the nation can issue a dollar bond, it can also issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also. The difference, between the bond and the bill, is that the bond lets the money-broker collect twice the amount of the bond, and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort, provided by the Constitution, pays nobody, but those, who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd, to say that our country can issue bonds, and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the people were no good, then the bonds would be no good, either. It is a terrible situation, when the Government, to insure the national wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges, at the hands of men, who control the fictitious value of gold. Interest is the invention of Satan.

F.A. HAYEK
The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception.

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

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.

from Money: Whence it came, Where it Went , 1975, pp. 15, 29

HOWARD BUFFETT 
(former U.S. Congressman / father of Warren Buffett)

"The gold standard acted as a silent watchdog to prevent 'unlimited public spending.' Our finances will never be brought in order until Congress is compelled to do so. Making our money redeemable in gold will create this compulsion." " When you recall that one of the first moves by Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler was to outlaw individual ownership of gold, you begin to sense that there may be some connection between money, redeemable in gold, and the the rare prize known as human liberty. Also, when you find that Lenin declared and demonstrated that a sure way to overturn the existing social order and bring about communism was by printing press paper money, then again you are impressed with the possibility of a relationship between a gold-backed money and human freedom."