Money as debt quotes

Money as Debt Quotations

http://paulgrignon.netfirms.com/MoneyasDebt/references.htm

Quotation Sources
in order of appearance in the movie, Money as Debt

'Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the Field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.'

-- Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (1913)
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14811
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson

"Each and every time a bank makes a loan (or purchases securities), new bank credit is created — new deposits — brand new money."
Graham F. Towers, Director, Bank of Canada
http://www.bankofcanada.ca/en/bios/tower.html
http://www.michaeljournal.org/appenE.htm

"The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled." John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist
http://www.johnkennethgalbraith.com/index.php?page=homepage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/john_kenneth_galbraith.html
http://aurora.icaap.org/talks/galbraith.htm

"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."
Mayer Amschel Rothschild, International Banker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Rothschilds
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=ridiculous
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/mayeramsch170274.html

"I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that banks can and do create money ...And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people"
Reginald McKenna,
past Chairman of the Board, Midlands Bank of England
http://www.answers.com/topic/reginald-mckenna

“Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess.”
Irving Fisher, economist and author
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Fisher.html
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0254/is_1_64/ai_n13798782
http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/fisher.htm

“That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money.”

Marriner S. Eccles, Chairman and Governor of the Federal Reserve Board
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriner_Stoddard_Eccles
http://minneapolisfed.org/pubs/region/99-06/martin.cfm

"Everyone sub-consciously knows banks do not lend money. When you draw on your savings account, the bank doesn't tell you you can't do this because it has lent the money to somebody else."
Mark Mansfield
http://dkd.net/davekidd/politics/manmoney.html

"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 situation is almost incredible -- but there it is."
Robert Hemphill. Credit Manager, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
http://www.federal-reserve.net/healthemoneysystem.htm
http://www.worldnewsstand.net/today/articles/fedprivatelyowned.htm
http://www.the7thfire.com/SR/mandrake_mechanism.htm

“One thing to realize about our fractional reserve banking system is that, like a child’s game of musical chairs, as long as the music is playing, there are no losers.”
Andrew Gause, Monetary Historian
http://www.andygause.com

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
Albert A. Bartlett, physicist
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/bartlett/

“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
Kenneth Boulding, economist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_E._Boulding
http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/boulding.htm
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/Boulding/kboulding-con0.html

“I have never yet had anyone who could, through the use of logic and reason, justify the Federal Government borrowing the use of its own money... I believe the time will come when people will demand that this be changed. I believe the time will come in this country when they will actually blame you and me and everyone else connected with the Congress for sitting idly by and permitting such an idiotic system to continue.”
Congressman Wright Patman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Patman
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/PP/fpa62.html
http://www.tamu.edu/upress/BOOKS/2000/young.htm

“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal, that there is no human relation between master and slave.” Leo (Lev)Tolstoy
http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/tolstoy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy

“None are more enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Goethe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/goethe.htm
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/johannwolf134023.html

“’The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough money to buy it back again...
Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in. But if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit’.” Sir Josiah Stamp Director, Bank of England 1928-1941
(reputed to be the 2nd richest man in Britain at the time)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Stamp,_1st_Baron_Stamp
http://members.shaw.ca/theultimatescam/index.htm

On Sourcing Quotes

Presidential Quotes on Banking

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world, no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” Woodrow Wilson

Producer's Comment

This quote attributed to Woodrow Wilson is widely used in the monetary reform community and is found in several reputable works, including Wikipedia. I used the quote in Money as Debt without finding an original source.

The research below indicates that this quote is cobbled together from quotes found in Wilson's book "the New Freedom", which itself is cobbled together from speeches Wilson made in 1911, before the Federal Reserve was established. However, if this is what Wilson thought before the Federal Reserve, how could further establishing the power of a "small group of dominant men" make Wilson happy?

The unhappiness of Woodrow Wilson

Did the president lament the day he "unwittingly ruined" his country by creating the Federal Reserve? Andrew Leonard [2007-12-21]

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/12/21/woodrow_wilson_federal_reserve/
Friday, Dec. 21, 2007 11:23 PST

Did Woodrow Wilson bitterly regret his role in creating the Federal Reserve? Some readers of my post yesterday on Ron Paul and the Federal Reserve believe so. Two of them proffered an identical quote as evidence.

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. : : We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world -- no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."

On the hundreds of Web sites on which this quote appears, it is typically taken as proof of Wilson's remorse at handing over control of the nation's money supply to a cabal of Wall Street money men.

A common framing: "Woodrow Wilson signed into effect the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913. And said the following just six years later." Even the Wikipedia page for Woodrow Wilson includes the quote, as proof that "Historians generally agree that Wilson hated the Federal reserve, and it made him, by his own word, "a most unhappy man..."

Frequency of repetition doesn't make for reliable sourcing, however, and convincing documentary evidence that Wilson uttered such words, in reference to his role creating the Federal Reserve, is hard to come by. In fact, the available evidence suggests that the quote is an after-the-fact fabrication made by splicing together passages of different Wilson statements that have nothing at all to do with the Federal Reserve.

Two separate portions of the quote appear in The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People," published in 1913. "The New Freedom" is a distillation of campaign speeches Wilson made while running for President in 1911.

On page 185 there is the following section:

A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.

And on page 201:

We are at the parting of the ways. We have, not one or two or three, but many, established and formidable monopolies in the United States. We have, not one or two, but many, fields of endeavor into which it is difficult, if not impossible, for the independent man to enter. We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world -- no longer a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.

Now, this is all good rabble-rousing stuff, but its relevance to the creation of the Federal Reserve is nonexistent. The speeches these quotes were adapted from were delivered before the Federal Reserve was created. And as for the melodramatic utterance: * "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country," well, so far, the sourcing well is coming up dry.

“All of the perplexities, confusion, and distress in America arises, not from the defects of the Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.”

More Presidential Quotes

John Adams, Founding Father of the American Constitution “Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce...and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”

James A. Garfield, assassinated president of the United States The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity.”

Abraham Lincoln, assassinated president of the United States
http://www.themoneymasters.com/presiden.htm
http://www.wealth4freedom.com/truth/2/bankquotes.htm

"Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes the nations laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognised as its most sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of parliament and of democracy is idle and futile."
William Lyon Mackenzie King
http://chatna.com/author/kingmackenzie.htm
http://www.collectionscanada.ca/primeministers/h4-3250-e.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lyon_Mackenzie_King

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National autodetermination practiced in past centuries"
David Rockefeller in an address to a Trilateral Commission meeting in June of 1991
http://www.freedomdomain.com/nwoquote.htm
Producer's Comment: More sources attribute this quote as occurring at a at Bilderberger meeting in Baden-Baden Germany in 1991

“Only the small secrets need to be protected.
The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity.”
Alternately quoted as:
"Only puny secrets need protection.
Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."
Marshall McLuhan, media “guru”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
http://www.angelfire.com/ms/MediaLiteracy/McLuhan.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mcluhan.htm

Not in the Movie
Misc Quotes on Banking
http://www.freedomdomain.com/bankquot.html
http://www.barefootsworld.net/banking-fed-quotes.html

More Relevant Quotations from
http://www.freedomdomain.com/nwoquote.htm
http://www.svpvril.com/nwo.html
'The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.'
Benjamin Disraeli, first Prime Minister of England, in a novel he published in 1844 called Coningsby, the New Generation

'The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments plans. '
British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, 1876

"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press....They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers."
U.S. Congressman Oscar Callaway, 1917

'The real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation. Like the octopus of real life, it operates under cover of a self created screen....At the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both political parties.'
New York City Mayor John F. Hylan, 1922

'From the days of Sparticus, Wieskhopf, Karl Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemberg, and Emma Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.'
Winston Churchill, stated to the London Press, in 1922

'The government of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semi-occult power which....pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron of World War I.'
British military historian Major General J.F.C. Fuller, 1941

"For a long time I felt that FDR had developed many thoughts and ideas that were his own to benefit this country, the United States. But, he didn't. Most of his thoughts, his political ammunition, as it were, were carefully manufactured for him in advanced by the Council on Foreign Relations -- One World Money group. Brilliantly, with great gusto, like a fine piece of artillery, he exploded that prepared "ammunition" in the middle of an unsuspecting target, the American people, and thus paid off and returned his internationalist political support.
"The UN is but a long--range, international banking apparatus clearly set up for financial and economic profit by a small group of powerful One--World revolutionaries, hungry for profit and power.
"The depression was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World Money powers, triggered by the planned sudden shortage of supply of call money in the New York money market....The One World Government leaders and their ever close bankers have now acquired full control of the money and credit machinery of the U.S. via the creation of the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank."
Curtis Dall, FDR's son-in-law as quoted in his book, My Exploited Father-in-Law

'A definite factor in getting a lie believed is the size of the lie. The broad mass of the people, in the simplicity of their hearts, more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.'
Adolf Hitler

'And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing … a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.'
Aldous Huxley, 1959

'I know the secret of making the average American believe anything I want him to. Just let me control television.... You put something on the television and it becomes reality. If the world outside the TV set contradicts the images, people start trying to change the world to make it like the TV set images.....'
Hal Becker, media 'expert' and management consultant, the Futures Group, in an interview in 1981

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have." Richard Salant, former President of CBS News

"The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds' central banks which were themselves private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups."
Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World in Our Time (Macmillan Company, 1966)
Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University, highly esteemed by his former student, former US President, Bill Clinton

"There is a small circle of men who control the world's finance. "Each member, before initiation, knows its religion to be reward for friends and extermination of enemies. Once a man is within the magic circle...punishment for disloyalty is sure and terrible, and in no corner of the Earth can he escape it, nor can any power on Earth protect him from it.
" The magic circle is "at the receiving end of the greatest information bureau in the world.""
Thomas Lawson, Everybody's Magazine "Frenzied Finance" 1904

"Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. Our minds are molded, our tastes are formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of."
Walter Bernays Propaganda 1928

" I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology....Various results will soon be arrived at: that the influence of home is obstructive....although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen....Educational propaganda, with government help, could achieve this result in a generation. There are, however, two powerful forces opposed to such a policy: one is religion; the other is nationalism....A scientific world society cannot be stable unless there is a world government."
Bertrand Russell 1958

Bible and debt

Psalms 37:21 - The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again: but the righteous sheweth mercy, and giveth.

Proverbs 22:7 - The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower [is] servant to the lender.

Romans 13:8 - Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.

Proverbs 22:26-27 - Be not thou [one] of them that strike hands, [or] of them that are sureties for debts. (Read More...)

Exodus 22:25-27 - If thou lend money to [any of] my people [that is] poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury. (Read More...)

Proverbs 3:27-28 - Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do [it]. (Read More...)

Proverbs 28:20 - A faithful man shall abound with blessings: but he that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent.

Deuteronomy 28:12 - The LORD shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work of thine hand: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow.

Luke 6:35 - But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and [to] the evil.

Proverbs 21:17 - He that loveth pleasure [shall be] a poor man: he that loveth wine and oil shall not be rich.

Deuteronomy 15:7 - If there be among you a poor man of one of thy brethren within any of thy gates in thy land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother:

Proverbs 6:6-11 - Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: (Read More...)

Proverbs 22:26 - Be not thou [one] of them that strike hands, [or] of them that are sureties for debts.

Money as debt quotes

Contents

On Sourcing Quotes

More Presidential Quotes

Bible and debt

Footnotes

Navigation menu

Money as debt quotes

On Sourcing Quotes

More Presidential Quotes

Bible and debt

Footnotes

Navigation menu

Search